Injustice at work and health: causation, correlation or cause for action?
- 1Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London Medical School, London, UK
- 2Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- 3International Institute for Society and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London Medical School, London, UK
- Correspondence to: Dr J E Ferrie Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, UCL, 1–19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK; j.ferrie{at}public-health.ucl.ac.uk
We thank Kawachi1 for a thoughtful commentary on our paper,2 which raised a number of interesting points.
At the end of the first paragraph, Kawachi asks if we have sufficient evidence to implicate organisational justice as a causal influence on worker’s health. Undoubtedly, at this point in time we do not, and relational justice, in common with any exposure that depends on the perception of the respondent, is unlikely ever to be able to fulfil all the Bradford–Hill criteria for establishing a causal link. Nonetheless, we believe that there remains much to be gained from further examination of such exposures and would like to continue discussion of the other issues raised by Kawachi: common-method variance, conceptual clarity and the social patterning of relational justice.
To date, there have been few studies of relational justice and in most studies that do exist, both the exposure and outcome have been self-reported. However, …
