INTRODUCTION

Intergenerational Effects

Do parents' adverse employment events affect their children? That parents' financial and psychological well-being might influence their children seems intuitively likely. Parents' loss of income should lower the whole family's standard of living and thereby threaten future opportunities to obtain important goals. Emotional stress on the parents following employment setbacks could infect other family members sensitive to the psychosocial climate of the family. But do such effects, if they exist, reach socially significant levels, and what form do they take? This chapter represents not the end of our exploration of underemployment and well-being but rather the beginning of an extension of this research across generations. We will explore the effect on the birthweight of firstborn children of adverse employment change experienced by women in the year before giving birth.

Evidence for a cross-generational impact of underemployment comes from various sources. Studies going back to the Great Depression have followed the lives of children whose parents coped with massive macroeconomic change (Elder, 1974). More recently, aggregate-level time-series studies have linked unemployment rates with community variations in levels of child abuse (Steinberg et al., 1981) and foster care placements (Catalano et al., in press).

INTRODUCTION

Welfare in the Employment Continuum

Welfare as Underemployment. Welfare may appear to be outside the domain of work and employment. In the United States, the term “welfare” has come to refer to public funds used to assist parents in the care of their young children. Usually, this has meant cash payments supplemented by other benefits such as food stamps and health coverage. In order to limit such assistance to the legitimately needy, eligibility rules have sometimes specified that the adult recipient (almost always the mother) have no source of income, such as her own job or the job of a working spouse. When such a recipient is neither working nor looking for work, she is officially counted as out of the labor force (OLF).

In practice, however, welfare recipients have significant connections to the labor market.

INTRODUCTION

Background

Depression and Stress. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (1994) (DSM-IV), major depressive disorder is characterized by at least one two-week long episode of depressed mood accompanied by at least four additional symptoms, such as feelings of worthlessness and recurrent thoughts of death or suicide. Psychological depression is a major public mental health problem affecting approximately 17 million Americans each year (Jacobs, Kopans, & Reizes, 1995). The lifetime prevalence of major depression has been estimated in the range of 10% to 25% for women and 5% to 12% for men with the point prevalence estimated in the range of 5% to 9% for women and 2% to 3% for men (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

This disorder can appear at any age, but the average age at onset is the mid-twenties, near the beginning of the age range of the NLSY respondents in 1992. This is a recurring disorder, with half or more of those individuals with major depressive disorder expected to have a second episode.

INTRODUCTION

Alcohol Misuse, Stress, and Employment

Alcohol Disorder and Its Causes. Alcohol misuse can be defined in various ways, including heavy consumption (i.e., binge drinking) and symptoms reflecting abuse (adverse personal and social consequences) or dependence (difficulty stopping drinking). One national survey estimated lifetime prevalence for alcohol abuse as 13.8% and bound it much higher for men (23.8%) than for women (4.6%) (Helzer, Burnam, & McEvoy, 1991). Alcohol disorder not only has high prevalence, but it can also result in severe outcomes both to the individual and to his or her loved ones, such as family disruption, psychological distress, and death by cirrhosis or automobile accident.

INTRODUCTION

The Paradox

A funny thing happened on the way to economic utopia. At the turn of the millennium, Americans were enjoying an economic expansion of record length that had begun in 1993. But a shadow hovered over the celebration of rising stock prices and falling unemployment rates. It was not the obvious fear that the next economic bust was lurking around the corner. Of course, there was a contraction in 2001, even before the September 11 terror attacks. But along with the threat of recession, there was a rising suspicion that even the best of economic times are somehow flawed. The conventional wisdom assumes that an economy that minimizes unemployment must be good.

INTRODUCTION

Overview

Longitudinal Designs. This chapter will describe the longitudinal research design, the data sources, and the key measures used throughout this book. In contrast to cross-sectional designs, which measure all subjects at a single point in time, longitudinal research includes a variety of different designs, each having differently timed measurement periods as a common component. Longitudinal approaches that assess a different group of individuals at each point in time are called “trend” designs. In contrast, a “panel” design measures the same individuals at multiple points in time (for further details on such designs, see Babbi, 1995; Bijleveld et al., 1998; Kleinbaum, Kupper, & Morgenstern, 1982; Menard, 1991). All of our analyses employ panel designs.

Panel designs are particularly useful because they characterize change over time within individuals (intraindividual change) as well as between individuals (interindividual change). Clarification of the temporal sequence of events is central to the study of complex causal relationships between variables. Experimental research designs deal with this problem by arranging for the presumed cause (a manipulated independent variable) to take place before the presumed effect.

RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS

Expanding Measures

Including Inadequate Employment. The present findings argue for expanding the usual paradigm of research on unemployment that contrasts people with and without jobs. On several well-being indicators, people who fall from adequate to economically inadequate employment resemble those who become unemployed altogether. This finding implies that researchers can no longer treat all jobs as functionally equivalent. If the changing nature of work brings a rising share of economically inadequate jobs, the health consequences linked to these changes will increasingly demand our attention.

Researchers could, with little extra effort, subdivide employees on the basic economic dimensions of hours and wages. Are employees getting sufficient hours of work, or are they working involuntarily part-time? Are workers receiving hourly wages that, on a full-time basis, provide an adequate standard of living (e.g., relative to the federal poverty guideline or to local cost-of-living measures)? Our research suggests that small-sample studies with too few respondents in either the low-wage or the low-hours subgroup could combine such subgroups into a single group for analytic purposes. This subdivision by hours and wages offers an inexpensive, objective, and theoretically appealing way of categorizing workers for the purposes of social epidemiological research.

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS

Social Causation

Adverse Employment Change. This research has produced the key finding that not only job loss but also other kinds of adverse employment change can carry psychosocial and health costs. Specifically, these studies show that falling into various types of underemployment is associated with a variety of underivable outcomes. These outcomes include decreased self-esteem (Chapter 5), increased alcohol abuse (Chapter 6), elevated depression (Chapter 7), and lower birthweight (Chapter 9). Both unemployment and such economically inadequate forms of employment as low-wage and involuntary part-time work appear to be linked to each of these outcomes, and these links often have similar magnitudes.

Intermittent Unemployment. Interestingly, intermittent unemployment had opposite associations depending on the outcome. For school-leavers, intermittent unemployment had a negative relationship to self-esteem similar to that of other forms of underemployment. But for alcohol abuse and depression, the intermittently unemployed seemed much more similar to the continuing adequately employed than to any of the other underemployed groups. We can understand this uneven pattern of results by reference to differences in both the outcomes and the employment statuses.

Self-esteem reflects an enduring appraisal based on one's overall record of successes and failures. The school-leaver who falls in the category of intermittent unemployment has a job with adequate wages and hours but, in appraising his or her self-worth, seems to dwell on the recent history of unemployment.

INTRODUCTION

History

A century of research on the health effects of employment stress has focused largely on just one aspect of underemployment—job loss or unemployment. But this literature also provides a theoretical framework for understanding the health consequences of other forms of underemployment, such as inadequate employment. And it provides empirical guidelines for designing new research on these understudied forms of underemployment.

Durkheim's (1966) analysis of suicide, published in 1897, provided one of the earliest studies of economic stress and health. Durkheim suspected that one cause of suicide was anomie, the disorientation and alienation consequent on losing the supportive structure of social norms. He theorized that anomie increased during periods of great change, including economic turbulence. In contrast to the later focus on adverse employment change, Durkheim suspected that change per se, economic expansions as well as contractions, would increase anomie and, in turn, suicide. He offered empirical data showing an association between absolute economic change and suicide rates. This hypothesis received further attention from researchers using modern econometric methods, generating evidence both pro (Pierce, 1967) and con (Marshall & Hodge, 1981).

This sociological debate about the relative importance of absolute versus adverse economic change has a parallel in the psychological literature on the impacts of different kinds of life events.

This book reports a decade of research on underemployment. Our present approach grew out of an earlier program of research that focused narrowly on job loss and its psychological and physical health costs. A century of unemployment studies had corroborated the conventional wisdom that job loss could harm well-being, particularly the mental health of dislocated workers and their immediate family members. But the suspicion remained that some forms of employment might also carry social costs that were being ignored.

Our initial efforts to study the consequences of various forms of underemployment were frankly exploratory. But positive findings from the study of one outcome stimulated further research on other outcomes. Findings of the adverse effects of underemployment on self-esteem among school leavers invited follow-up analyses of alcohol abuse, depression, and birthweight. Parallel findings for these different indicators appeared across different survey years, representing different life stages of the respondents and different economic environments in which they worked or sought jobs. The data seemed to insist that not only unemployment but also inadequate employment had a strong and pervasive connection to all of the outcome measures that were available for our study.

Those of us who conduct research on employment status have had to recognize the importance of the prevailing economic climate. It defines the opportunity structure that determines the risks of individual job change, both good and bad. It also provides the environment for comparison and self-assessment in which individuals judge their relative well-being and future prospects.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores the relationship between employment status and self-esteem in young people. Controlling for their self-esteem when the NLSY respondents were still in secondary school, does later self-esteem vary depending on whether the school-leaver is unemployed, inadequately employed, adequately employed, or out of the labor force?

Employment and development

Work and Childhood. Child labor laws now encode the consensus that young children risk serious harm from most kinds of labor. This harm may be either physical (e.g., risk of injury) or psychological (e.g., denial of appropriate education). These laws do not allow young children to work except under unusual circumstances (e.g., child actors) and then only with careful monitoring to protect against exploitation and mitigate the risks (e.g., providing tutors on the movie set). Nevertheless, reports still surface from time to time of child labor being practiced under horrific circumstances.

INTRODUCTION

Background

A century of research has repeatedly found an association between adverse employment change – usually unemployment – and indicators of ill health, particularly behavioral and emotional disorders. However, the interpretation of this correlation has proved difficult. As noted in Chapter 2, at least three different mechanisms could account for it, each intuitively plausible: social causation, confounding, and selection.

Social causation views adverse employment change as the cause of ill health. The remaining chapters of this book will focus on this mechanism, with the others controlled. An ever-present rival explanation to both social causation and selection involves confounding by other variables. When the contributions of such confounding variables are removed, usually by statistical control, the initial association may weaken or disappear. Any prior variable that serves as a risk factor for both employment and health change could function as a confounder. For example, growing up in poverty may increase the risk of intermittent unemployment in adulthood because of educational inadequacies. In addition, it may increase the risk of ill health in adulthood as a result of inadequate health care in childhood or the acquisition of poor health habits.