A study on the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and job stress and satisfaction among healthcare workers in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic

This cross-sectional study included 454 of 500 invited (over 90 % response rate) healthcare workers (physicians, nurses, midwives, technicians, and other health personnel) working with COVID-19 patients in primary healthcare institutions across Turkey selected through convenience sampling. They all received an email with a link to a web-based questionnaire, which explained the purpose of the study and information that participation was voluntary. The survey took place between 9 and 30 August 2021.

The study was approved by the Gümüşhane University Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee (approval No. E-95674917-108.99-56174). As authors, we take the full responsibility for the integrity of the questionnaire, study design, and data collection and analysis. Instead of a written consent, the respondents provided one by completing the agreement section of the questionnaire.

The survey consisted of a personal information form and adapted job stress and Minnesota satisfaction questionnaires. Personal information included gender, age, marital status, department, and whether the respondent ever worked in a COVID-19 intensive care unit (at the time of the study or any time before that), and education.

For the job stress scale we relied on the questionnaire developed by Dr Suzanne Haynes and adapted to Turkish by Aktaş (8). The questionnaire consists of 10 questions, and total scores <12 indicate low stress, 12–30 moderate stress, and >30 high stress. The reliability of the Turkish version was high in two different studies (8, 9). In our study, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.46 when all items were included. To raise it to an acceptable level, we ran factor analysis to eventually remove items 2 and 5, which had a low relationship with the scale. This boosted reliability to an acceptable level of 0.61.

To measure job satisfaction we relied on the questionnaire developed by Weiss et al. (10) and adapted to Turkish by Baycan (11). It consists of 20 items scored on a 5-point Likert-type scale, each ranging from “I am not satisfied” (1 point) to “Very satisfied” (5 points). The reported reliability is 0.77, but in our study it was 0.93.

All statistics were run on the IBM SPSS 26 package (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). The significance level was set to p<0.05. First we determined the normality of distribution with the Shapiro-Wilk test and it resulted normal (p=0.148). We then used the independent samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for paired comparisons. Data showing significant differences were then further analysed with Tukey’s test for pairwise comparison, since the groups were homogeneously distributed and the frequencies of the groups were not equal. The effect of sociodemographic characteristics on job stress and job satisfaction was analysed with multiple regression, and categorical variables compared with the chi-squared test.

Table 1 shows no significant differences between male and female healthcare workers by marital status, whether they worked in the COVID-19 ICU, or age, but differences were significant in the distribution by department and education.

Table 2 shows the relationship between job stress and satisfaction with sociodemographic characteristics of healthcare workers determined with the t-test and one-way ANOVA. As expected, healthcare workers ever stationed in the COVID-19 ICU had higher stress and lower job satisfaction. Married respondents also reported significantly higher stress. No significant differences were found between the genders.

Gender also did not influence self-reported job satisfaction, but marital status did, as single healthcare workers reported significantly higher satisfaction than the married ones. The same is true for healthcare workers with the lowest education compared to the rest, and the satisfaction dropped with higher education. In contrast, respondents who worked in the emergency department and the COVID-19 ICU at the time of the survey reported significantly lower satisfaction than those working in other departments.

Table 3 shows the results of multiple regression analysis predicting the effects of sociodemographic characteristics on job stress and job satisfaction. Sociodemographic characteristics explain 5 % of the variance related to job stress and 12 % of the variance related to job satisfaction.

In the order of importance the most significant predictors of job stress were working in the COVID-19 ICU and older age and of job satisfaction education level, working in the COVID-19 ICU and being married.