Impact of Psychological Factors on Socio-Professional Integration and their Interaction with Social and Economic Domains

Coordinating Institution: Université du Luxembourg
From: 01/01/2004
To: 30/06/2007
Budget: 249,158.00€
Contact(s): Houssemand Claude

Summary

The project has two different aims : (1) to find out what the main characteristics of unemployed people in Luxembourg are, that could predict the duration of unemployment (profiling), and (2) to study the impact of duration of unemployment on the well-being and job-search behaviour of the unemployed. Questionnaires were completed by a group of 384 newly unemployed people at the Unemployment Agencies of Luxembourg and Esch-Alzette. The collected data were matched with information about employment status (unemployed with or without benefits, relevant unemployment measure, employed, excluded from unemployment benefits) of the persons that were extracted anonymously from the database of the Unemployment Agency. Our first analysis regards the evolution of the psychological dimensions measured at 0, 6 and 12 months of unemployment, for those who remained registered unemployed at these times.

Results indicated that with the exception of change coping between 6 and 12 months, no other psychological variable changed significantly during the 12 months of unemployment. Specifically, no decline in mental health or psychological well-being could be evidenced during the time period of our study. We then studied what predictive validity, the variables measured at the beginning of unemployment, could have on employment status at 6 and 12 months. For the period 0 to 6 months, with 4 demographic and socio-professional dimensions (age, loans, initial training and unemployment benefit) it was possible to predict correctly the employment status of 74.4% of the subjects. Adding psychological variables only slightly improved the result. For the period 6 to 12 months, it was possible with 3 demographic and socio-professional dimensions (age, revenue at the beginning of unemployment, and unemployment benefit) to correctly classify 72.5% of the subjects.

Adding the significant psychological variables only improved the result in a modest way. For the period 6 to 12 months, it was possible with 2 demographic and socio-professional dimensions (age and sex) to correctly classify 62.6% of the subjects. Adding the significant psychological variables (openness, self-efficacy, social anxiety, symptom reduction coping, intelligence) improved the result by 12.1 percentage points, this being a substantial improvement of the predictive power of the model. This means that in the profiling of people already unemployed for 6 months, the above-mentioned psychological dimensions play a role. It is therefore recommended that socio-professional profiling be used at the beginning of unemployment, and that additional psychological profiling be used only when people are still unemployed after 6 months.