Job Strain and Mental Health: a Comparison in Human Services Professionals from Six Latin-American Countries

Introduction
Job Psychosocial factors’ theme is an emergent issue which indeed is an international priority for the next decade according the most important Institutions in charge of occupational and work fields worldwide. Demand/Control Model is definitively the most representative method so as to explore psychosocial work conditions related to health problems. Even this model is widely used and validated in America and Europe; in Latin-America the evidence of the model remains almost unknown. This way, this work concentrates data of six Latin-America countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, México, Perú y Venezuela) with the aim to analyze the association between demand/control model and mental health.

Methods
A non-experimental and cross-sectional study was carry out in a 925 non random sample of human service organizations in the six different countries (Mean Sample size of 154 for each country). 90% of the participants were hospital personal staff. The Job Content Questionnaire and the General Health Questionnaire were used.

Results
The results showed that not isolated variables both the combinations of high demands and low control (job strain) are associated with high symptoms of mental health problems not only in each country but also in the global sample (r=10, up to r=.45). Also it was found that mean values across countries for job strain, job insecurity and social support differ significantly, showing that Colombia has the higher values for job strain.

Discussion
According to the results we conclude Demand/Control Model/Mental Health relationship is valid in Latinamerican context of human service occupations, and Colombia is suffering the worst job strain conditions. Also in general, Latin-America mean values of psychosocial factors compared to USA and European national means showed that Latin-America has worst psychosocial working conditions.