Psychosocial work conditions

Socioeconomic status is a powerful predictor of child health and development. A key factor shaping household socioeconomic status is the quality of parental employment. As the labour market in Canada has shifted towards more precarious forms of work, a growing share of parents are having to rely on casual, insecure, and low-wage jobs to make ends meet. The declining quality of parental employment has significant but underappreciated implications for children and their families. In this talk, Dr. Faraz Vahid Shahidi will present findings from research examining parental employment quality as a social determinant of children’s mental health and development in Canada. By drawing attention to an upstream driver of early-life socioeconomic disadvantage, this research can help inform policies and programmes aimed at promoting child health and health equity.

Published: June 2026

Work injury prevention and workers’ compensation agencies in Canada and Australia have a growing interest in approaches to prevent and manage work-related psychological injuries. This is due to the increasing number of these conditions, and their greater wage replacement and health-care costs compared to physical injuries. Despite this interest, there have been few formal comparative overviews of approaches taken to prevent and/or manage these types of injuries across different jurisdictions.

The objective of this project was to explore the extent to which workers’ compensation systems provide coverage for different types of psychological injuries; the strategies both workers’ compensation systems and occupational health and safety (OHS) prevention agencies adopt to address psychosocial exposures in the workplace both before and after injuries occur; and the benefits, challenges and other outcomes of each of these strategies from the perspective of those working in these jurisdictions. The findings from this project will be of interest to policy-makers in other jurisdictions, both within Canada and Australia, and more broadly.

Published: May 2026

Workers who feel their workplaces are not committed to their mental wellbeing have more than twice the risk of work-related physical or mental health injuries compared to workers who feel the opposite. That’s according to an IWH study that asked workers about the psychosocial safety of their workplace—that is, whether an organization prioritizes mental health and wellbeing, and takes action to prevent psychosocial hazards. The study found that poor psychosocial safety and poor physical safety both increase the risk of work-related mental and physical injuries.

Published: February 2026

Published: American Journal of Industrial Medicine , January 2026

Published: American Journal of Preventive Cardiology, November 2025

Children whose parents work low-quality, precarious jobs are more likely to experience mental health problems and perform poorly at school. That’s according to a pair of studies, co-led by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH), that drew on two large-scale surveys of children and parents from Ontario and across Canada.

Published: September 2025

There is currently little research evidence on differences and similarities in systems-level approaches to reducing the number and impact of work-related psychological injuries. This study addresses this gap by mapping the approaches used by regulators, prevention agencies and workers’ compensation organizations to prevent and manage psychological injury in jurisdictions in Canada and Australia.

Status: Completed

An IWH study is using general population surveys in Canada to better understand the role of parental employment quality as a social determinant of child mental health.

Status: Ongoing

In the fall of 2020, Ontario educators who taught in a virtual environment felt isolated and unsupported, while those working in-person experienced anxiety related to the risk of COVID transmission. That’s according a study of Ontario teachers, conducted by OHCOW and IWH.

Published: October 2022

The Guarding Minds @ Work survey is designed to measure 13 dimensions of the psychosocial work environment. But a study of its measurement properties, carried out by IWH and OHCOW, finds it unable to measure each dimension in isolation.

Published: May 2022