Santé publique France is France’s national public health agency. A public institution under the authority of the Minister of Health, formed through the merger of several public institutions and established by Ordinance 2016-246 of April 15, 2016, the agency works to promote public health. As a scientific, expert, and public health safety agency, its missions include:

1. Epidemiological observation and surveillance of the health status of the population; 
2. Monitoring health risks threatening the population;
3. Promoting health and reducing health risks;
4. Developing prevention and health education;
5. Preparation for and response to health threats, alerts, and crises;
6. Issuing public health alerts.

The agency is organized into 12 divisions—some scientific, some cross-functional, and some providing operational support.

The agency’s strategic priorities and work program, established by its Board
of Directors, are organized into three areas: Strengthening the capacity for anticipation and rapid response to health threats; Measuring and assessing the extent of diseases and risk factors to guide their prevention and control; Strengthening the health impact of all public policies and the prevention and promotion of health.

Department of Occupational Health and Safety

Internship Responsibilities

Coset-Indépendants is a cohort consisting of workers enrolled in the social security system for the self-employed (RSI) in 2016. Of those invited to participate, 20,000 responded in 2017–2018 to an online questionnaire about their professional activity and health status. Descriptive analyses have already been conducted. The objective of this internship is to study the links between occupational factors and depressive disorders.

Internship Activities

The student’s primary task will be to select and apply the most appropriate statistical method to assess the association between depressive symptoms and occupational factors—particularly psychosocial and organizational risks—while accounting for confounding factors. The database used will be the final version, which includes corrections and, in some cases, imputations for certain variables. Scores for depressive symptoms and work-related psychosocial risks have already been calculated:

• depressive symptoms were assessed using the 20-item CES-D scale,
• psychosocial risks were assessed using the Siegrist questionnaire, which calculates two scores: the effort-reward imbalance ratio and the overinvestment score.

The activities for this internship are:

• select, from the literature, the most relevant method used in observational studies, particularly in cross-sectional studies
• to identify, through a literature review, the factors (available in the Coset questionnaire) to be considered a priori in the analysis of the association between depressive symptoms and occupational or non-occupational risk factors;
• examining the distribution of each of these factors in relation to depressive symptoms and their multicollinearity;
• construct a final multivariate model to examine the association between depressive symptoms and occupational risks, and produce results;
• write a summary document describing the methodology and presenting and discussing the associated results.