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.