Do(n’t) Worry, It’s Temporary: The Effects of Fixed-Term Employment on Affective Well-Being

Paul Schumann () and Lars Kuchinke ()
Additional contact information
Paul Schumann: International Psychoanalytic University Berlin
Lars Kuchinke: International Psychoanalytic University Berlin

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2020, vol. 21, issue 7, No 12, 2557-2582

Abstract: Abstract This paper examines the impact of fixed-term employment on the affective and cognitive well-being of employees operationalized by the subjective frequency of the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, fear and anger as well as life satisfaction. Longitudinal effects were analysed across 10 waves of sampling from the Socio-Economic Panel, an annual representative survey in Germany. Random effects within between model analyses were applied to examine differences between fixed-term and permanent workers as well as within effects of a change of contract type. In addition, the impact of the direction of contract type change was evaluated by examining subsamples with changes from fixed-term to permanent and vice versa. The results suggest that fixed-term employees’ affective well-being is lower, while cognitive well-being (or happiness) is hardly affected. A change from permanent to fixed-term contracts is associated with higher frequencies of self-reported fear and sadness experiences, while a change in the opposite direction results in lower frequencies. In addition, life satisfaction was only found to increase with the change from fixed-term to permanent employment. While the effect on fear is masked by job security, acting as a mediating factor, the effect on sadness remains significant when the model is controlled for job security. Thus, by treating cognitive and affective well-being as separate constructs this study provides new insights into the psychological costs of fixed-term contracts and reveals the strong impact of fixed-term employment on self-reported experiences of sadness.

Keywords: Fixed-term employment; Affective well-being; Temporary employment; Life satisfaction; Subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-019-00194-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:21:y:2020:i:7:d:10.1007_s10902-019-00194-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-019-00194-8

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().