In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Dr. I. David Daniels, Founder and CEO of ID2 Solutions, LLC, explains what psychosocial hazards are and how they affect workers.
This clip is taken from a webinar titled Psychosocial Hazards Are Real, which is available for free on-demand here. This webinar is sponsored by Industrial Scientific Corporation and MSA Safety.
Dr. Daniels recently published a new book: Psychosocial Hazards are Real.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Daniels: So what does the word psychosocial mean? When I was writing the book, I had a couple of folks tell me, “That seems like a really hoity toity, long word.” I just couldn’t find a better word to describe what was really going on.
It’s an adjective that refers to the interaction between social and psychological things. So it’s the combination between how we think, what’s going on in our mind, our feelings, our emotions, and how we interact with others, Psycho: how we think; social: how we interact with others.
And this is why this hazard is so important when we talk about the workplace. The workplace is a social gathering. It is a place where human beings get together to accomplish something. Whatever that something might be, that something can change from day-to-day. But also, I can change from day-to-day.
So it’s important to focus on the environment and how does the environment influence how I behave. A psychosocial hazard. And this definition is unique to my research.
As I was trying to figure out this concept, I did qualitative research around psychosocial hazard exposure and how it affected workers and found that even across the literature, there was not a really clear definition of what a psychosocial hazard is.
I found multiple definitions across the world. As a matter of fact, even in the international standard ISO 45,003, it is a guidance document to address psychosocial risk that identifies 88 psychosocial hazards but does not technically define what the hazard itself is.
So I defined it. A psychosocial hazard is a psychosocial factor that’s perceived or experienced by the person who’s exposed to it as threatening, and that exposure or that perception of threat causes their behavior to be different. So again, I perceive something as threatening and I behave differently.
How I think and then how I behave. That also drives how I interact with other people.