THE WORKING AND LIVING CONDITIONS OF CIVIL SERVICE TYPISTS. General Research Series Paper No. 93, June 1978

O'Broin, NOIRIN and Farren, Gillian (1978) THE WORKING AND LIVING CONDITIONS OF CIVIL SERVICE TYPISTS. General Research Series Paper No. 93, June 1978. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

Following conferences for Superintendents and Supervisors of Civil Service typists convened by the Department of the Public Service, the authors of this report were asked to carry out a survey of facts and attitudes relating to all typists employed in government offices in Dublin. This necessarily involved an acquaintance with their work and working conditions. One of the authors therefore made use of previous experience in industry to work as a typist in a Departmental typing section, while the other visited typing sections in other Departments. The information gained from this participative observation and from interviews was then used to construct two questionnaires. The first of these was specifically about the work the typists did, the size and type of work groups to which they belonged, the officials they typed for, their Supervisors, and their pre-employment training. The same questionnaire contained a number of general questions of the kind usually incorporated in questionnaires addressed to office and industrial workers; these were taken from job satisfaction studies carried out in Ireland and elsewhere and, where necessary, modified. The second questionnaire sought to establish the effect of the location of the typists’ work on their lives outside work. Unlike most social surveys which are based on samples, the present study encompassed practically every Civil Service typist working in Dublin in 1972.

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