The Impact of Unemployment on Health

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Table of Contents

1.Research Hypothesis1

2.Background of the Study1

3.Literature Review2

4.Proposed Methodology9

5.Pilot Questionnaire11

6.Improvements in the Questionnaire13

7.Limitation of the Study14

8.Bibliography15

9.Appendix18

The Impact of Unemployment on Health

Research Hypothesis

Ho - The recent unemployment situation due to the global economic crisis is responsible for the ill-health of unemployed citizens

H1 - The recent unemployment situation due to the global economic crisis is not responsible for the ill-health of unemployed citizens

Background of the Study

An individual's good health or happiness depends on various factors that include job market status, leisure, social relationships, job characteristics, income, security and many others. Unemployment is one of the most damaging experiences for a working-age individual. Lose a job or become unemployed, and odds are you are not in great health. People who have recently experienced instability in their job usually tend to be in worse health conditions than their stably employed counterparts. After the Great Depression in the year 1930, researchers and scientists have been regularly documenting that a person who currently lost a job or is out of work is exposed to a greater risk of ill-health. Some of these diseases include psychological distress, risk of mortality, chronic disease and poor overall health. (See, e.g., Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel. 2001 [1933]; Smith 1987; Beal and Nethercott 1987; Gallo et a1. 2000; Bjorklund 2005) Furthermore, this phenomenon has been observed in several countries with weaker and stronger labour markets, changing health care systems and social welfare, and different cultural attitudes toward work. (Korpi 2001; Arrow 2005; Claussen, Bjorndal and Hjort 2003; Keefe et a12002, Wadsworth, Montgomery and Bartley 2006) So what does this association mean to our study? It points to an important link between economic position, work and well-being. But is it the psychological and economic stress involved with unemployment or it's the period of unemployment that actually causes people's health to decline?

Job loss and unemployment could harm health. This project uses a variety of strategies to address these questions.

Employment is a fundamental component of social life. In conversation, we can ask the very vague question: what do you do? And it is implicitly understood that we are inquiring about someone's work. Employment is so crucial to people's place in the social world that it is taken as given in one of our most common conversation starters. This was of course not lost on our most influential stratification theorists who assumed employment to be central to defining stratification orders. Marx's division between capitalists and proletariat, for instance, is crucially linked to work and employment. Weber's notions of class and status can also be tied to work and employment. In short, employment is a powerful determinant of a person's place within the social world, and it is not a stretch to imagine that its disruption in the form of job loss or unemployment could harm health. But, health and biological well being are also powerful determinants of individual lives. The saying "at least you have your health" points to how crucial health is to normal functioning and ...