Job Demands and Back Injury in Navy Personnel

Abstract

Department of Defense physical fitness guidelines call for Occupation-specific fitness standards for exceptionally demanding occupations. Physical demand ratings (PDRs) can be an efficient tool for identifying those occupations, but no previous study has defined a rating criterion score to determine which occupations should be classified as exceptionally demanding. This study examined the relationship between PDRs and back injury hospitalization rates (BIRs) for 73 entry-level U.S. Navy occupations. The study demonstrated a strong relationship between PDRs and BIRs (r = .59). which increased substantially when two outlier occupations were dropped from the analysis (r = .72). A quadratic function was used rather than a linear function (r = .74). Applying the quadratic function, any Occupation with a rating of 2.93 or higher had a predicted BIR significantly higher than the predicted BIR for a minimally demanding job. Using this criterion to define an exceptionally demanding job, 44% of the 73 occupations studied would require occupation-specific fitness standards.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA370142

Entities

People

  • Linda K. Hervig
  • Martin R. White
  • Ross R. Vickers

Organizations

  • Naval Health Research Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Back Injuries
  • Data Science
  • Databases
  • Department Of Defense
  • Factor Analysis
  • Health
  • Health Care
  • Health Services
  • Hospitalizations
  • Information Science
  • Medical Personnel
  • Physical Fitness
  • Psychological Tests
  • Psychology
  • Quadratic Equations
  • Regression Analysis
  • Wounds And Injuries

Readers

  • Gender and Food Studies
  • Marine Hydrodynamics
  • Military Leadership and Professional Education.