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Objectives Job stress is a growing epidemiologic field in France. The aim of this study was to evaluate the levels of occupational psychosocial risk factors to which the French working population is exposed. It also focused on developing a job-exposure matrix. Methods This study used existing French national data on work conditions collected by the French Ministry of Labor in 1991, in which 20 929 workers were interviewed by questionnaire. The items of the questionnaire were retained that represented potential stressors. A principal component analysis was performed to summarize the data in terms of job-stress factors. Four independent variables (gender, age, occupation, and activity) were available, as well as scores for exposure to psychosocial risk factors. The CART (classification and regression tree) segmentation method was used to construct the job-exposure matrix. Results Fourteen psychosocial factors were identified and interpreted on the basis of the results of the principal component analysis and deepened by experts’ judgment. To take into account the well-known difference of distribution in occupations between men and women, a gender-specific matrix was developed. Conclusions This study is the first attempt to develop a job-exposure matrix in the area of job-stress factors in France. Thus the results have allowed the assessment of exposure to 14 psychosocial factors for all of the 455 categories of the French occupational classification for men and women separately.

Objectives This study aimed at reconstructing changes in the frequency and levels of occupational asbestos exposure in France over the past century. Methods Work histories were collected during 11 population-based case-referent studies recently carried out in France, and an asbestos-specific job-exposure matrix including 10 625 jobs was used to estimate indices of past occupational asbestos exposure. The results were estimated from a sample of 4287 subjects, bootstrapped 200 times. Results The distribution of socioeconomic categories within the sample was compared with that of the general population in 1954, 1962, 1968, 1975, and 1982. The proportion of blue-collar workers was similar. The highest proportion of exposed subjects was found between 1950 and 1980. Around 10% of each 10-year age class was exposed to asbestos. For those born in 1930-1939, 15.2% was exposed between the ages of 20 and 29 years. For each age class born in 1900-1939, the proportion exposed at least once by 60 years of age ranged from 18.2% to 24.5% and, of those exposed, the cumulative duration of exposure ranged from 11.3 to 15.4 years by the age of 60 years. A population exposure index showed that the heaviest exposure occurred between 1960 and 1970 and that the age classes born between 1920 and 1929 were the most heavily exposed. Time trends showed that the mean value of this index for the men aged 20-59 years reached a peak in the 1960s and then decreased. Conclusion This study presents data of reasonable validity about occupational asbestos exposure in France and its trends over the past century; the data are being used to forecast the development of male mortality from mesothelioma in France.