Background: The typological approach of the employment quality (EQ) framework offers a comprehensive lens for assessing the heterogeneity of employment experiences while concurrently acknowledging associated health risk factors. EQ incorporates multiple employment characteristics-such as working hours, wages and benefits, and union representation, among others-where standard employment relationship (SER)-like (or high EQ) features are distinguished from nonstandard features (low EQ). Low EQ features are known to relate negatively to health outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Soc Determinants Health Health Serv
October 2024
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychological capital (PsyCap) is a multidimensional concept entailing hope, self-efficacy, optimism, and resilience. This paper argues that it can be considered a form of "capital" explaining social inequality. We test whether PsyCap can be integrated into the Bourdieusian capital framework by assessing its relationship with social, economic, and cultural capital.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSerious illness, death, and bereavement are common experiences within the work and study context. This study aims to explore the experiences and support needs of university students and staff confronted with serious illness, death, and bereavement. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 21 students and 26 staff.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
March 2023
Youth unemployment is a problem that undermines young people's health and well-being and is also a concern for their immediate communities and society. Human values predict health-related behaviour; however, this relation is very little studied and not examined earlier among NEET (not in employment, education or training) young people. This study aimed to explore the association between four higher-order human values (conservation, openness to change, self-enhancement, self-transcendence), self-rated health (SRH) and subjective well-being (SW) among NEET young men and women (n = 3842) across European regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Dual labour market theory raises questions about the relationship between non-standard employment and job quality. While scattered empirical evidence exists, there is a paucity of systematic evidence on the relationship between workers' employment status and job quality.
Objective: The authors investigated the relation between workers' employment status (e.
Compassionate Communities are places and environments in which people, networks, and institutions actively work together and are empowered to improve the circumstances, health, and well-being of those facing serious illness, death, dying, and loss. The study of their development, implementation, and evaluation requires an interdisciplinary research approach that has hitherto been lacking. In 2020, 8 research groups from 4 faculties at Vrije Universiteit Brussel united in the interdisciplinary Compassionate Communities Center of Expertise (COCO) to investigate Compassionate Communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: There is strong evidence for the importance of previous employment for mental health at older age but little is known about the role of partner's employment history in this. Life course theory suggests that individual trajectories are linked and evidence from cross-sectional studies suggest that there are cross-over effects within couples. Therefore, the present study tests the interdependence of own and partner's employment history and their relationship with depressive symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt Arch Occup Environ Health
November 2018
Objectives: Working more (overemployment) or less (underemployment) than preferred has been associated with poor mental health in cross-sectional studies, but longitudinal evidence is scarce. We investigate whether under- and overemployment is associated with 2-year changes of mental health and whether associations vary by job rewards (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough many governments actively stimulate self-employment, their work-related mental well-being remains understudied. The aim of current study is to investigate the mental well-being of different types of self-employed, testing whether mental well-being differences among self-employed are explained by the presence of work characteristics that are in accordance with the ideal-typical image of the "successful entrepreneur" (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBecause of compositional effects (more highly educated unemployed) and differences in the vulnerability towards the health consequences of unemployment (i.e. disappointment paradox hypothesis and/or status inconsistency for highly educated unemployed), it is argued that indicators of educational attainment need to be included when investigating the social norm of unemployment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study explores the association between involuntarily working less or more than the standard workweek and poor mental well-being, and whether this relationship is dependent upon (changing) national-level unemployment and gross domestic product growth rates. Data from the European Social Survey Round 2 (2004-2005) and Round 5 (2010) were analyzed. The sample included 16,224 male and 16,184 female employees.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article reports evidence gained by the SOPHIE Project regarding employment and labor market-related policies. In the first step, quality of employment and of precarious and informal employment in Europe were conceptualized and defined. Based on these definitions, we analyzed changes in the prevalence and population distribution of key health-affecting characteristics of employment and work between times of economic prosperity and economic crisis in Europe and investigated their impact on health outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFlexicurity policies comprise a relatively novel approach to the regulation of work and welfare that aims to combine labour market flexibility with social security. Advocates of this approach argue that, by striking the right balance between flexibility and security, flexicurity policies allow firms to take advantage of loose contractual arrangements in an increasingly competitive economic environment while simultaneously protecting workers from the adverse health and social consequences of flexible forms of employment. In this study, we use multilevel Poisson regression models to test the theoretical claim of the flexicurity approach using data for 23 countries across three waves of the European Social Survey.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this article is to explain the results of the SOPHIE project regarding the effect of gender policies on gender inequalities in health in Europe. We start with the results of a systematic review on how gender regimes and gender equality policies at the country level impact women's health and gender inequalities in health. Then, we report on three empirical analyses on the relationship between different family policy models existing in Europe and gender inequalities in health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Few studies investigating health inequalities pay attention to the intersection between several social determinants of health. The purpose of this article is to examine the relation between perceptions of work-related health and safety risk (WHSR) and (1) immigrant background and (2) gender in the EU-15. The effects are controlled for educational attainment, the quality of work (QOW) and occupation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relation between "neo-Marxian" social class (NMSC) and health in the working population has received considerable attention in public health research. However, less is known about the distribution of mental well-being according to NMSC in a European context. The objectives of this study are (i) to analyse the association of mental well-being and NMSC among employees in Europe (using a welfare regime typology), (ii) to investigate whether the relation between NMSC and mental well-being is the same in women compared to men within each welfare regime, and (iii) to examine within each welfare regime the role of the gender division of labour and job quality as potential mediating factors in explaining this association.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: There is the tendency in occupational health research of approximating the 'changed world of work' with a sole focus on the intrinsic characteristics of the work task, encompassing the job content and working conditions. This is insufficient to explain the mental health risks associated with contemporary paid work as not only the nature of work tasks have changed but also the terms and conditions of employment. The main aim of the present study is to investigate whether a set of indicators referring to quality of the employment arrangement is associated with the well-being of people in salaried employment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The objective of this study is to examine social inequalities in employee mental well-being, using relational social class indicators. Relational social class indicators are based on theoretical insights about the mechanisms generating social (health) inequalities. Additionally, it is examined whether the psychosocial work environment and employment quality act as intermediary determinants of social class inequalities in mental well-being, simultaneously testing the mediation (differential exposure) and moderation (differential vulnerability) hypotheses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFew studies have addressed the effect of gender policies on women's health and gender inequalities in health. This study aims to analyse the relationship between the orientation of public gender equality policies and gender inequalities in health in European countries, and whether this relationship is mediated by gender equality at country level or by other individual social determinants of health. A multilevel cross-sectional study was performed using individual-level data extracted from the European Social Survey 2010.
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