Document text
Principal Investigator: Anjum Hajat
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Fiscal Year: 2020
Award: $234,766
Funding agency: National Institute on Aging
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted - and exacerbated - the pervasive race/ethnic and social class based
health inequities in the US today. Our essential but precarious food provision, service, and delivery workers are
at increased risk of exposure to SARS-COV-2 and related health consequences. At present, the robust
guidelines prepared by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are not enforceable and COVID-19
related paid leave provisions are largely inaccessible by this segment of the workforce. Our objective is to
show how workplace and other contexts shape individual behavior and define the role of employment quality in
the hindrance or expansion of access to resources and opportunities necessary for engagement in individual-
level COVID-19 prevention behaviors. Through individual structured and semi-structured interviews with older
low wage food provision, service, and delivery workers in the states of Indiana and Washington, we aim to
answer three research questions: 1) What do older workers know about COVID-19 prevention and where do
they get their information? 2) What are the personal and social factors that drive adherence or non-adherence
to prevention practices while at work and compliance with the broad preventive guideline of staying home
when feeling sick? 3) How does place (including local policies, political culture, industry, and demography)
influence the adherence to COVID-19 prevention practices for older workers? We will conduct 40 interviews
per site (n = 80 total) with low income workers over 50 years old employed in the food provision, service and
delivery industries, recruiting participants through social media and other venues. A stratified purposeful
sample will allow identification of major variation across subgroups of interest, and facilitates comparisons
across the two sites. Subgroups of interest will be defined by high versus low contact with others at work,
race/ethnicity, sex/gender and education. In addition we will compile and review documents and prepare
descriptive statistics from publicly available sources to understand the influence of place-based factors in
hindering or improving adherence to COVID-19 prevention practices. In conducting this qualitative inquiry, we
leverage our multidimensional conceptualization of employment quality as a framework for probing and
contextualizing the experiences of these precarious essential workers. Knowledge gained through rich
qualitative interviews will shed light on workplace interventions and policies that may improve prevention
practices and reduce likelihood of infection with the virus while also improving public health messaging for this
vulnerable population.
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