Relationships Between Experience, Shift Duration, And Stress In Wildland Firefighters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wildland firefighters are exposed to demanding occupational conditions, including long working hours, which may affect levels of subjective stress and autonomic function. PURPOSE: This study investigated years of experience as well as shift duration and their respective relationships to indices of stress. METHODS: An observational study was conducted on 24 wildland firefighters employed by the British Columbia Wildfire Service (15 M, 9F) throughout July to September of the 2021 and 2022 fire seasons. Subjective stress was measured for all participants (n = 24) while only a subset collected heart rate variability (HRV) (n = 12, 8 M, 4F). Years of firefighting experience was collected via baseline questionnaire, while post-shift stress (4-point Likert scale) and shift duration were collected via daily self-reports. Resting measures of heart rate and parameters of HRV were recorded prior to bed using a chest-worn monitor (Polar H10). Pearson correlation analyses were performed to test for associations between years of experience, shift duration, and indices pertaining to stress. RESULTS: Correlation analyses revealed a significant relationship between years of experience and HRV parameters for the subset group including HF power (log) (r = -.51, p < .0001), HF power (ms2) (r = -.52, p < .0001), RMSSD (r = -.56, p < .0001), and SDNN (r = -.54, p < .0001) along with remaining HRV correlations mentioned in Table 1. Associations were also found between experience and post-shift subjective stress (r = .14, p < .01) along with shift duration and post-shift subjective stress (r = .26, p < .0001). No correlations were found between shift duration and HRV parameters, however mean HR (r = .20, p < .10) and mean RR interval (r = -.19, p < .10) trended towards significance. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that years of experience working as a wildland firefighter may provide protective benefits countering the effects of long working hours on perceived stress and autonomic function. - Correlations Between Experience, Shift Duration, and Indices of Stress Experience Shift Duration Stress Pearson R df Stress Pearson R df Subjective Stress (1-4) 0.14*** 284 Subjective Stress (1-4) 0.26***** 280 HF Power (log) -0.51***** 90 Mean HR 0.20* 75 HF Power (ms2) -0.52***** 90 Mean RR -0.19* 75 RMSSD -0.56***** 90 SDNN -0.54***** 90 HF Power (n.u) -0.23** 90 HF/LF 0.20** 90 Mean HR 0.26*** 90 Mean RR -0.34**** 90 Note. p < .10 = *, p < .05 = **, p < .01 = ***, p < .001 = ****, p < .0001 = *****
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".