Assessment of stress and associated factors in employees of a public higher education institution

INTRODUCTION: Occupational stress is considered as the negative imbalance between work demands and resources, and it can generate consequences to an individual’s health and interfere with his or her quality of life. OBJECTIVES: To investigate stress and its associated factors among employees of a higher education institution through a cross-sectional study (at the baseline of a longitudinal study) including 176 individuals aged 18 years or older. Sociodemographic characteristics related to physical surroundings, lifestyle, working conditions, and health and illness were tested as explanatory variables. METHODS: Stress was estimated using prevalence rate, prevalence ratio (PR), and a 95% confidence interval. For a multivariate analysis, we employed a Poisson regression model with robust variance, where a p-value ≤ 0.05 was considered significant. RESULTS: The prevalence of stress was 22.7% (16.48-28.98). This study noticed that depressive individuals, professors, and those who self-assessed their health as poor or very poor had a positive association with stress within the studied population. CONCLUSIONS: Studies of this type are important for identifying characteristics in this population that could contribute to the planning of public policies in order to improve the quality of life of employees of public institutions.