Temporary work and depressive symptoms: A propensity score analysis
Section snippets
Data
We use prospective data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), which has followed, longitudinally, from 1979 to the present, a nationally representative cohort of American men and women between 14 and 22 years of age in 1979. Details on the survey methodology have been described elsewhere (Zagorsky & White, 1999). Our sample is based on longitudinal records from this dataset collected biennially between 1992 and 2002. Data are publicly available online and were
Temporary work
In 1994, 1995, and 1998, questions based on the Supplement on Contingent Work of the Current Population Survey (CPS) were fielded, and detailed information was collected on up to five jobs in the period since last interview. Temporary work exposure was based on self-reported answers to the following question: “[Are/Were] you a regular employee at this job, do you consider yourself a temp worker, consultant or contractor, or are you an employee of a contractor? By “THIS JOB”, we mean the one you
Propensity score analyses
We follow the strategy described by Oakes and Johnson (2006) and use psmatch2 in Stata 10 for our analyses (Leuven & Sianesi, 2003). As mentioned in the introduction, temporary workers may differ substantially from permanent workers in a number of ways, one of them being that they may be selected into these positions as a result of pre-existing poor mental health. This situation can pose a problem with methods that simply control for confounders, as they assume overlapping distributions of
Model 1
Table 2 presents the results of the matching process for Model 1. For each predictor, the averages among temporary workers and non-temporary workers are presented, before and after matching. As the standardized differences in the fifth column indicate, most of the differences are well below 10%, with race and age just above that cut-off point. All the predictors saw an improvement in the bias as a consequence of matching, as indicated by the uniformly positive column of % of reduction in bias.
Discussion
This study finds an important increase in depression symptom severity associated with exposure to temporary work at any point in time in the two preceding years (including concurrently). Most importantly, these results were obtained through propensity score matching on a number of covariates affecting the likelihood of temporary work status, including, most notably, prior depressive symptoms. Moreover, the exposed group was limited to workers who reported temporary employment status, and did
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for assistance from Tania Jenkins and comments from Thomas DiPrete and reviewers. We acknowledge funding support from Canadian Institutes for Health Research grant MOP77800 (PI: Quesnel-Vallée) and a salary award from the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec to Quesnel-Vallée.
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