A Longitudinal Study of the Psychological Well-Being of Unemployed Men and the Mediating Effect of Neuroticism

Abstract

This paper proposes that the psychological experience of unemployed persons is determined by the stressfulness of the environment, but the relationships between the two is affected by certain conditioning variables, e.g., general health and social class, and by personal attributes such as their commitment to being employed and the tactics they use to cope with being unemployed. This model is tested empirically in a longitudinal study of 75 men who were studied on three occasions over a period of 2 years. Stepwise multiple regression was used to test the model on three occasions, and it was shown to be reasonably successful in predicting variations in psychological well-being. At time 3 of the study, trait neuroticism was measured to test the hypothesis that the large correlations among all negatively-toned scales found in the first two phases of the study were the result of a personality trait such as neuroticism. The results strongly supported this hypothesis. The implications of this for other self-report studies of stress are discussed.