La valutazione dello stress nel settore agricolo italiano

This research aims to investigate and detect the typical antecedents of working stress within agricultural sector in Italy, and enhances practices using a new assessment tool tailor-made. To measure psychosocial risks within agricultural working environment, specific organizational and productive aspects were taken into account. The exploratory methodology adopted, such as sharing and comparing, involved trade unions, workers and employers in a multi-technique strategy using survey mixed instruments as personal interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. The collection of data to define a typical model was possible involving 7 agricultural unions and 231 farmers, that made it possible to draw up an assessment tool, named ASQ agricultural stress questionnaire, aimed to evaluation of psychosocial risks in farms. The use of ASQ have produced some indices of risk management like scale means that enabled organizations to compare their working conditions in a benchmarking system to prevene stress and to control the levels of well-being. Some objective factors like company legal form and various types of farming were directly correlated to stress level perceived by farmers. The findings show that organizations, whether they are family owned or cooperatives or whether they are dairy farms or wineries, in both cases the factor scores on ASQ scale change significantly on some constructs such as human relationships, autonomy, control over their own work and support perceived to manage their life time. Although a taxonomic split in a four factor model of stressors has been defined and its psychometric properties have already been validated on a sample with 129 farmers, it would be useful for the future to conduct a cross-validation before generalizing these results among a wider italian farming population.