Work-related Stress and Psychopathological Risk Among Nurses: Specificities in Coping Profiles according to Gender and Life/Career Stages

Introduction: research has emphasized the need to support nurses in coping effectively with stress/psychological burden experienced routinely in their work. However, people’ appraisal of events and coping strategies may differ in women and men and may vary throughout the life span, so requiring the development of research accounting for potential gender- and life-stages-specificities to customize interventions fostering nurses’ adjustment/wellbeing. Responding to this need, the study adopted a Person-centred approach: 1. to verify whether patterns of coping strategies (Problem-Focused/SeekAdvice/Self-Blame/Wishful-Thinking/Avoidance) adopted by nurses to deal with stress varied according to Gender and differed throughout Life/Career Stages (young/less experienced, middleaged/senior, elderly/highly experienced nurses); 2. to explore potential differences in perceived stress (Effort-Reward-Imbalance) and psychological health (SCL-90-R-Global-Severity-Index) according to the emerged patterns by Gender and across the Life/Career Stages. Methods. Overall, 536 nurses (317 Women, 219 Men) completed self-assessment measures. Nonhierarchical k-means Cluster Analysis was used to derive patterns of coping by Gender. Crosstabulations/χ²analyses and MANOVAs were used to explore potential differences in pattern-belonging, stress and psychological health according to Gender and Life/Career Stages. Results. Cluster Analyses revealed a 4-factor solution across genders, yet suggesting three similar patterns labelled as Solution-Oriented, Disengaged, and Dysregulated-Emotion-focused, while another one gender-specific pattern: i.e., Detached-Emotion-focused for men and Self-Blaming-Emotion-focused for women. The belonging to coping patterns varied by Life/Career Stages: less experienced nurses mainly adopted emotion-focused patterns, while senior/highly experienced nurses mainly adopted SolutionOriented and Disengaged patterns. Nurses belonging to Dysregulated-Emotion-focused group were at the highest risk for stress and psychological disease across Gender and Stages. Men belonging to Disengaged group and women belonging to Self-Blaming-Emotion-focused group were also found to be at notable risk. Discussion: findings can be used to develop interventions fostering adjustment processes and health among nurses by accounting for gender and life-stages specific challenges.