 Tinker, tailor, soldier, patient: work attributes and depression disparities among young adultsFrederick J. Zimmerman, Dimitri A. Christakis and Ann Vander Stoep Social Science & Medicine, 2004, vol. 58, issue 10, 1889-1901 Abstract: Prior studies have consistently found the occurrence of depression to be higher among persons with lower socio-economic status (SES), but causal mechanisms for this relationship are often not well understood. For example, while depression has been shown to increase during spells of unemployment, little work has been done on job attributes that may be related to depression among employed people early in their careers. This study links the 1992 wave of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort--which included Depression symptom scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) instrument--to the US Department of Labor's new occupational characteristics O*Net dataset. The resulting dataset includes information regarding depression, SES, and specific attributes of jobs held by the young adult respondents. Job attributes included measures of social status, interpersonal stressors, and physical conditions. Multivariate analysis revealed that for young men, higher job status is associated with lower CES-D scores. Higher scores on the opposition scale, which measures the extent to which employees are obliged to take a position opposed to others, is associated with higher CES-D scores. For young women, physically uncomfortable or dangerous jobs are associated with more depressive symptoms. Results are stratified by race/ethnicity. For Black men, unlike for White men or Latinos, job security is associated with fewer depressive symptoms; and for Latino men, but not for Black or White men, physically uncomfortable or dangerous jobs are associated with more depressive symptoms. For Black women, job status is associated with fewer depressive symptoms. We conclude that part of the SES-depression relationship may arise from the psychosocial aspects of jobs, which we have found to be significantly and meaningfully associated with depressive symptoms among employed young adults. Keywords: Depression; Job; attributes; NLSY; O*Net; Social; epidemiology (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:58:y:2004:i:10:p:1889-1901 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.