Positive Impact of Prefabrication on the Mental Health of Construction Workers

Based on the literature-established benefits of prefabrication to promote better working conditions and its potential to enhance workers’ overall mental health, this study compares the state of mental health of traditional and prefabricated construction workers. In addition to the mostly adopted negative measures of mental health such as anxiety and depression, positive mental health indicators were also used to measure and compare overall mental health conditions of the two categories of construction workers. Data were collected with a questionnaire from 93 prefabricated factory-based and site-based construction workers in Australia. The survey contains eight items to measure poor mental health and seventeen variables of four sub-constructs of positive mental health (emotional, social, psychological, and cultural/religious well-beings). An independent samples t-test was employed to examine the significance of the differences between the means of traditional and prefabricated construction workers on the measured variables and their underlying constructs of mental health and well-being. The findings revealed significantly lower symptoms of burn-out (reduced task accomplishment), suicide ideation (feeling less interested in life), and depression among the workers in prefabricated projects. Similarly, prefabrication tends to provide a positive-mental-health-supportive environment, as the workers were found to be significantly healthier than traditional construction workers on the subjective measures of emotional, social, psychological, and cultural/religious well-beings. Assessing the predictive influence of prefabrication on the overall mental health of different groups of construction workers, especially with qualitative data from different samples in different times, is recommended for future studies.