Marnie Dobson Ph.D.

Associate Director, Center for Social Epidemiology
email: mdobson@uci.edu
Twitter: @MarnieDee1

Marnie Dobson, Ph.D. is currently Associate Director of the Center for Social Epidemiology in Los Angeles, California. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is collaborating with Dr. Peter Schnall and Dr. BongKyoo Choi at the UC Irvine Center for Occupational and Environmental Health on occupational health survey projects with CWA, HERE and the Orange County Fire Authority and IAFF Local 3631. Her research interests focus on gender and work, emotional labor, and work organization/psychosocial stressors and mental health outcomes. She is a co-editor and contributing author in the new book Unhealthy Work: Causes, consequences, cures, published this summer by Baywood Publishing.

Marnie Dobson has been working as a consultant with the Center for Social Epidemiology since 2005. She has contributed to the following activities in collaboration with CSE staff during 2010. First, with CSE support she prepared two abstracts based on a pilot web survey of Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) firefighters conducted with colleagues at the UCI COEH. One was accepted as an oral presentation and one as a poster at the 4th ICOH WOPS conference in Amsterdam in June 2010. The oral presentation was titled “Work, Health Behaviors and Obesity in Firefighters: A Pilot Study” and the poster presentation was titled “Work characteristics, Work Stressors and Psychological Distress in Firefighters: A Pilot Study.” In addition, she co-authored and reviewed several manuscripts and research presentations.

Secondly, along with other Center staff and colleagues at the UCI COEH she co-wrote and is a co-investigator on a successful grant proposal to NIOSH to study work characteristics, health behaviors and obesity risk in firefighters. The two-year study is currently underway at the UCI COEH as of November, 2010 with collaboration from other CSE staff.

Third, Marnie Dobson prepared and presented a report, initially completed in November 2009 based on a CSE-Communication Workers of America (CWA) supported pilot project studying Verizon line-workers in Southern California, to Verizon management and CWA representatives during a collective bargaining meeting in March 2010. She also prepared a follow-up letter outlining a study to be conducted in collaboration with Verizon Southern California and CWA to further study Verizon line workers and call-center workers.

Fourth, she continues work on a review article and meta-analysis of studies measuring ambulatory blood pressure and job strain. In collaboration with CSE staff, over 30 studies have been reviewed and assessed for validity. She has collected data from the eligible studies, as well as contacting multiple authors to clarify data and ask for additional data to include in a meta-analysis to study global effects of job strain on ambulatory blood pressures. The data has been compiled in a database using a meta-analysis software program, Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (CMA). She has also begun work on the methods section of the manuscript.

Fifth, Marnie Dobson has prepared and presented a lecture on work and mental health for the UCLA Work and Health course in May 2010. Sixth, as a co-editor she has presented at two “Unhealthy Work” book parties held to promote the CSE book Unhealthy Work: Causes, Consequences and Cures in Los Angeles and Berkeley, California. She also participated in the California Work and Health Study Group meeting in May 2010 at UC Berkeley.

Selected References