Quality of life at sea in Polish seafarer’s evaluation

Abstract

Background: Work at sea is highly burdening, hazardous and stressful. Environmental, physical, and psychosociological factors have a great impact on the seafarer’s quality of life and work. The research is a part of a broader psychological project performed on people working at sea in Poland during a period of 2011–2014.

Materials and methods: This report presents the self-evaluation of life quality conducted by a total of 1,700 Polish seafarers who took part in the study. The average age of the group was 45. Following methods were used: WHOQOL-BREF and the “Survey for people working at sea”.

Results: Polish seafarers gave the highest rates to their social relationships (16.27), then the psychological functioning (15.62), and environment (15.51). The physical domain gave the lowest rates (14.63).

Conclusions: The results have shown that quality of life of Polish seafarers is quite high.