Women and Health: A Study of Female Shift Workers In the Transportation Industry

摘要

In 2008, the Sleep Research Unit at the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto defined "shift work" as an individual working outside of the hours of 7am to 6pm. As of 2004, 15% of the American workforce, or roughly 8.5 million Americans, were engaged in some sort of shift work (Chung, Wolf, Shapiro, 2009). Areas such as transportation, military, restaurant staff, law enforcement, hospitals, and health and safety are just a few examples of the professions that require shift work of some sort. There has been an extensive amount of research conducted on the ill effects of shift work and at night work when the body would typically be sleeping (Barton, 1994). Research literature has had a tendency to fall into three main areas of study: the disturbances in our sleep/wake or circadian cycles (eg., Akerstedt, 1990; DeKonick, 1997; Reinberg, A & Ashkenazi, I, 2008), the physical ill-health effects on our bodies (eg. Barton, L. 1994; Costa, 2003; Amelsvoort, Shouten, E., & Kok, F, 1999; Lin, Y, Hsiao, T, & Chen, P, 2009), and the social and family disturbances that can be a result of working shift work (eg., Culpepper, 2010).