OSH News

EU-OSHA has made now available the Workers’ Exposure Survey (WES) on cancer risk factors in Europe dataset. The survey was conducted by local interviewers in Germany, Ireland, Spain, France, Hungary and Finland between September 2022 and February 2023 using CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview), completing 24,402 valid interviews. 

The dataset includes three types of variables: 

1. Demographic and job-related variables for each respondent: gender, age category, country of birth, activity sector of the company, occupation of the worker, type of employment/contract, workplace size, job category, … 
2. Answers to the questions tailored to the worker’s job category defined at the start of the interview. 
3. Exposure assessment to 24 cancer risk factors for each respondent, conducted after the survey fieldwork via OccIDEAS.

To get familiar with the data, EU-OSHA strongly recommends using only demographic and job-related variables (type 1 above), and exposure assessment variables (type 3). 

EU-OSHA makes several documents available, together with the dataset, so that researchers can find their way through the complex dataset, e.g. questionnaire, documentation, explaining note, list of related publications. The WES dataset and the relevant technical documents can be downloaded here.