A critical review on “Employee’s perceptions of the impact of work on health behaviours”
Abstract:
Nicola Payne et al. conducted interviews among twenty four employees to study the impact of work on health behaviours. This article aims to critically review Nicola Payne et al.’s published paper “Employee’s perceptions of the impact of work on health behaviours”, especially analysing the strengths and limitations of the research method they used and make some recommendation for improvement.
Key words: review interview work health behaviours criteria
Introduction:
Interview as a qualitative method has been widely used to do research in numerous areas. Nicola Payne et al. conducted a study in 2008 on the impact of work on health behaviours from employee’s perceptions using interview as research method as well. More specifically ,they categorised four themes of work: the work environment, business events, being busy at work and work stress. And the four health behaviours they looked into are smoking, drinking, eating and exercise. This article aims to critically review this published paper, “employee’s perceptions of the impact of work on health behaviours”, especially on the research method and make some recommendations for improvement.
In this paper, I will start by summarising this published paper, giving a broad idea of this paper and then analysing the strengths and weaknesses of it. Next, I will focus on the interview research method this paper used and identify five strengths and four limitations of the research method in this paper based on my won point of view and the criteria Tracy(2010) identified. More specifically, I will look at the sample collection section, data analysis process and the credibility of the method. Finally, I will make some recommendations according to the problems I concerned.
Summary of the paper
The aim of this paper is to present a whole picture of the impact of work on health behaviours and the research method used is qualitative methodology. More specifically, the health behaviours been investigated in this article are smoking, drinking, exercise and eating. Twenty four employees in a multinational company were interviewed and their opinions were analysed and categorised.
First of all, the authors conducted a semi-structured interview among employees to give a broad idea about how their work affected their health behaviours negatively and positively. Next, according to the data and information collected in the above section, the authors used Braun and Clarke’s six-stage process to complete a thematic analysis (TA) to identify four major theme about work, namely, the work environment, business events, being busy at work and work stress. More specifically, theme one work environment included sub-themes of policy, convenience and temptation; theme two business events had routine, convenience and temptation, workplace cultural norms as sub-themes; theme three being busy at work was analysed by sub-themes time and tiredness separately; at last, bad days and good days were identified as sub-themes in theme four work stress. The authors then conducted a formal interview among 24 employees and found that work have almost equally positive and negative effect on smoking and exercise while it seems mostly have negative effect on eating and drinking although it seems psychologically health to drink within the daily allowance.
Strengths and weaknesses of the paper
On one hand, in my opinions, this paper overall have two strengths. First, this paper is well structured. In the introduction section, the authors looked back and had a review on the former papers which gives readers some background knowledge and generate a gap question leading to the present study. Then the authors listed four advantages of the present study which gives readers an idea about the value of reading it. Next in the method section, the authors provided a detailed description of the
