Regional Factors on the Self-rated Health of Wage Workers

Minjung Kwon; Eunsuk Choi

doi:10.12799/jkachn.2018.29.1.21

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Kwon and Choi: Regional Factors on the Self-rated Health of Wage Workers

Original Article

J Korean Acad Community Health Nurs 2018;29(1):21-32.

Published online: 12 March 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.12799/jkachn.2018.29.1.21

Regional Factors on the Self-rated Health of Wage Workers

Minjung Kwon¹, Eunsuk Choi²

¹College of Nursing, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea

²College of Nursing · Research Institute of Nursing Science, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea

Corresponding author: Choi, Eunsuk College of Nursing, Kyungpook National University, 680 Gukchaebosang-ro, Jung-gu, Daegu 41944, Korea. Tel: +82-53-420-4936, Fax: +82-53-421-2758, E-mail: eschoi2007@knu.ac.kr

Received 6 August 2017 Revised 18 January 2018 Accepted 26 January 2018

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Purpose

This study attempted to identify regional disparities of self-rated health among Korean wage workers and to investigate the influencing factors on them.

Methods

The study subjects were 25,069 workers in 16 regions who were extracted from the 2014 Korean Working Condition Survey (KWCS). A multilevel analysis was conducted by building hierarchical data at individual and regional level.

Results

In this study, 'financial autonomy rate' and 'current smoking rate' were identified as regional factors influencing the workers' self-rated health. When the socio-demographic and occupational factors of the workers were controlled, 'current smoking rate', a health policy factor, explained the regional disparity of workers' health status.

Conclusion

We found that the health status of workers can be affected by the health behavior level of the whole population in their residential area. In order to improve the health status of working population and to alleviate their regional health inequalities, it is necessary to strengthen macro and structural level interventions.

Keywords: Multilevel analysis, Occupational health, Health status disparities, Residence characteristics, Health behavior

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Figure 1.

The conceptual model of this study.

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