Systematic Review on Research Status of Workplace Violence

Yeo Gyeong Yoon; Kyunghee Jung-Choi

doi:10.12771/emj.2019.42.4.56

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Yoon and Jung-Choi: Systematic Review on Research Status of Workplace Violence

Original Article

The Ewha Medical Journal 2019; 42(4): 56-64.

Published online: 29 October 2019

DOI: https://doi.org/10.12771/emj.2019.42.4.56

Systematic Review on Research Status of Workplace Violence

Yeo Gyeong Yoon, Kyunghee Jung-Choi

Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Ewha Womans University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.

Corresponding author: Kyunghee Jung-Choi. Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Ewha Womans University College of Medicine, 25 Magokdong-ro 2-gil, Gangseo-gu, Seoul 07804, Korea. Tel: 82-2-6986-6235, Fax: 82-2-6986-7022, jungchoi@ewha.ac.kr

Received 25 July 2019 Revised 10 October 2019 Accepted 11 October 2019

Ewha Womans University School of Medicine

(open-access):

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Objectives

Research on workplace violence has been conducted, but rarely has been organized systematically. In this study, we summarize the definition and classification of workplace violence studies and review the literature on workplace violence.

Methods

Using academic search engines PubMed, Google Scholar and DBpia, we found 856 papers including “workplace violence” and “adverse social behavior” AND workplace in the title published until December 2018, and 208 papers were selected. The selected papers were classified by continent and country, year of publication, occupation, classification criteria of workplace violence, and research topic.

Results

By country, the number of articles in the United States was the most with 40 (19.2%), followed by China 27 (13%), Korea 16 (7.7%), and Taiwan and Australia 15 (7.2%). By job category, healthcare workers accounted for the largest portion with 162 (79.0%) of the total, and 80 of them were conducted on nurses. Other occupations included civil servants, manufacturing workers, toll collectors and wageworkers. Among the classification methods of workplace violence, 147 (67.4%) articles were classified as type and there was a difference in the type of violence defined for each article. In the research topic, 114 (44.2%) articles analyzed the effects of workplace violence, and 105 (40.7%) articles describe the prevalence and characteristics of workplace violence, and 23 (8.9%) articles analyzing the causes of violence.

Conclusion

The research topic is biased toward the field of healthcare, so it is necessary to expand to include various occupations or other specified occupations. It is also necessary to prepare appropriate measures against workplace violence.

Keywords: Workplace violence, Exposure to violence, Systematic review

Figures and Tables

Fig. 1

Selection process of literature to be studied in research.

Fig. 2

Frequency of published workplace violence studies by year.

Table 1

Proportion of countries and continent in published workplace violence studies

Table 2

Occupational distribution of participants in published workplace violence studies

Values are presented as number (%).

^*Addiction treatment center staff, emergency medical workers, firefighters, police officers, social worker, educational worker, female worker, adolescent worker, retail and service workers, fishery worker, and sex worker.

^†Call center worker, bank clerk, substitute driver, toll collector, and manufacturing worker.

Table 3

Classification criteria for published workplace violence studies (duplicate aggregation)

Values are presented as number (%).

Table 4

Topics of published workplace violence studies (duplicate aggregation)

Values are presented as number (%).

^*Reasons for not reporting violence.

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