The article, authored by Rebeka Balogh, Deborah De Moortel, Sylvie Gadeyne, Julie Vanderleyden, Chris Warchust, and Christophe Vanroelen titled "Is it the Past or the Present? Employment Quality, Unemployment History, Psychological Distress and Mental Wellbeing in the United Kingdom" has been published in "International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services". The full text of this article (open access) is available here. Below you can read the abstract.
Low employment quality and precarious employment have been associated with adverse mental health outcomes, yet the extent to which this association may be explained by the experience of unemployment “scarring” has not yet been explored. From a life course perspective, understanding this possible confounding is necessary. Drawing on the United Kingdom's Understanding Society dataset and using latent class analysis, we derived a typology of employment quality across six dimensions and assessed the links between individuals’ employment quality, unemployment history, and mental well-being and psychological distress. Our results show that precarious types of employment as well as a higher quality “protected part-time” were linked to low mental well-being, though important gender differences were noted. Accounting for past unemployment did not fully explain these associations. No such adverse associations were observed for increased psychological distress. Our results help further the understanding of employment quality as a social determinant of health and highlight the need for both life course and gender-sensitive research in this area.
