Study On The Quality Of Life Of Male Taxi Drivers And Its Influential Factors

Quality of life is a subjective index of health, which inflects the difference between individual expectation and real life, the greater the difference, the worse the quality of life.Quality of life can evaluate many dimensionality of health of people synthetically, including body health and whole states of physical, mental and social adaption. Many factors can influence quality of life. As for public, the main influential factors are diseases, income, age etc. But as for occupational people, quality of life is still consistent with the occupational characteristics. Quality of life can be deemed as a kind of method that can deeply and comprehensively evaluate light health impair and occupational harm. The aim of the current study is to measure the quality of life of taxi drivers with the SF-36 and discuss its influential factors of this occupational group, and to take measures for enhancing taxi drivers' quality of life.The research is a cross-sectional investigation. Subjects of the study were selected by cluster sampling. The sample included 570 taxi drivers coming from 5 companies, who had worked for 1 year or over 1 year.443 qualified questionnaires were returned. All the subjects investigated were males with an average age of 40.2 and an average working age of 5.4. The data were analyzed with SPSS11.5.The Cronbach's alpha coefficient of SF-36 was higher than 0.8, which means that SF-36had good inter-item consistency. The factor analysis showed that the cumulative rate of variance of the factors drawed from the items of SF-36 is 64.6% and the factors with higher cumulative rate were basically consistent with the actual conditions. The result shows that the SF-36 has good construct-related validity.Each scale of the male taxi driver in SF-36 was lower than the reference value of male in Sichuan province, and the difference was statistically significant. There was a significantly negative correlation between age and PF, BP, SF, the correlation coefficient was-0.122,-0.107,-0.135 respectively.According to different length of service, it showed statistics significance in six scales, which were GH, VT, SF and MH. According to the different daily working hours, it showed statistics significance in six scales, which were PF, BP, GH, VT, SF and MH. According to different working hours in a month, it showed statistics significance in seven scales except for RP.The prevalence rates of the overweight, smoking, drinking were 35.5%, 75.2% and 19.2% separately, which were higher than average values of male in city. And the low back pain had been ranked first, which was 80.1%, and neck unwell prevalence was 51.7%. These three factors had no influence on quality of life. According to different times of exercise per week, it showed statistics significance in six scales, except for RP and RE. According to the disciplinary repast, those who had a regular repast had higher scores in all eight scales than those who had not.According to fatigue persistence, it showed statistics significance in all eight scales. According to body unfitness, it showed statistics significance in six scales, except for PF and RP. According to chronic condition, those who had no chronic diseases had higher scores in all eight scales than those who had.When the effect of interaction between factors was excluded by use of multivariate regression, the fatigue persistence, chronic condition, disciplinary repast and age remained to be significant risk factors to all or most of the scales of the SF-36. It was suggested that some measures should be taken to promote the quality of life of taxi drivers.The main reasons for job unsatisfacion were hardship, irregular living, little time with friends and family, no promotion, mental strain, and little entertainment time. In the 30～50 year old group, the incidence of the low quality of life was getting higher with aging.