Is there any known correlation and/or prooved cause-effect relationship between highly irregular work shifts' circular deviation (dispersion metric in Circular Statistics) and workers' performances/health (excessive sleepiness, decreased alterness, increased accident risk, etc)?
For example, in "roster work" used in service-oriented occupations, such as transport, health care, law enforcement etc.
This has been a documented issue for probably at least 50 years. Google "rotating shift work". Here is a link from the National Institute of Health which was the first link that came up for me:
Effects of Clockwise and Counterclockwise Job Shift Work Rotation on Sleep and Work-Life Balance on Hospital Nurses - PMC (nih.gov)
Steven Prevette thank you for your answer.
I know about these studies you cited. I was searching for something more specific, for shits of roster-work (Akerstedt 1998) often used in service-oriented industries (such as transport, airports ground staff, etc).
These schedules are much more irregular than usual. A worker can have, for example, shifts in consecutive 6h-working-days that start at 11:00, 05:30, 09:30, 19:00 and 16:30. These are not rotational but highly variable within a wide range, from 0 to infinite circular deviation (square root of -2 times the natural logarithm of the mean resultant length, where hours are transformed to radians).
I'm searching for a correlation between this deviation (or similar metrics for similar work shifts) and workers' health/safety.
Just be more specific in the search. for example I put in railroad in quotes along with rotating shift work health effects and got
The work schedules for both types of dispatcher jobs are similar, with shifts that cover 24 hours (h) of each day, 7 days (d) a week. Three types of work schedules exist for dispatchers: regular daily shift (first or day, second or evening, third or night), relief, and extra board. Regular jobs work 5 consecutive d on the same shift followed by 2 consecutive d off. Relief jobs work 5 consecutive d by rotating through the shifts in a pattern such as 2 days, 2 evenings, and 1 night. While the regular and relief jobs work the same days each week, the extra board jobs do not have a fixed schedule. The extra board dispatchers fill in for regular and relief dispatchers as necessary. and
Data from dispatchers’ daily logs revealed some differences in alertness levels based on the shift worked. For all shifts, alertness peaked after the commute to work but then declined throughout the day. The decline in alertness was greatest on third shift.
FROM
https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/17501/ord0711.pdf
Steven Prevette all these papers (and all other papers I found on PubMed) are about "common" rotational shifts (where the circular deviation is +∞) or shifts that vary from week to week (where the circular deviation is null).
I'm interested in "what lies in the middle", more irregular work shifts (roster shifts) where the circular deviation s ∈ (0, +∞).
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