April 1 – 5, 2019
Sonja Scheuring attended the greatly organized Integrating Research Infrastructures for European Expertise on Inclusive Growth (InGRID-2) Spring School on “Vulnerable Groups on the Labour Market” – Determinants and Consequences of Economic Vulnerability across Europe at the University of Amsterdam from April 1 – 5, 2019. Moreover, she was invited to give a presentation on her recent work-in-progress on “Temporary Employment and Subjective Well-Being: Empirically Testing the Latent Deprivation Model within and across European Countries”.
In a vibrant and motivating international atmosphere of about 20 other PhD students from all over Europe as well as experts from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) and other important and interesting researchers in that research field from labor institutions or universities, she contributed on the outcomes of labor market vulnerability. Fixed-term employees are part of vulnerable groups – moreover they experience precariousness – as they are restricted in their labor market prospects and consequently fear unemployment phases due to the limitedness of their employment contract.
Using the European Social Survey (ESS) of 2012 with its module on the personal and social well-being, Sonja tested how temporary employment affects the well-being by testing Jahoda’s well-known Latent Deprivation Model in both an upwards (comparing temporary workers to permanent ones) and downwards (comparing temporary workers to unemployed individuals) comparative design. Connected to the chosen theory, she assumes also macro-level indicators to matter. To include this macro-micro level effect structure, she estimates multilevel regression models by using a two-step estimation procedure to unfold the effect heterogeneity between different European countries. This adds upon the research as most of the studies have been critiqued for the lacking country-comparative design, which might lead to very mixed findings across different papers.
First results point out that the impact of fixed-term employment in both upwards and downwards comparative perspectives are not too heterogeneous across Europe and that indeed macro-level variables moderate the effects on the individual level. Because the Spring Seminar entailed such a great variety of manifestations of vulnerability on the labor market – from disability to single motherhood – the debates were very fruitful and broadened the focus. Eventually, thanks to the great effort of Dr. Stephanie Steinmetz and Dr. Janna Besamusca put into the organizationm the InGRID-2 event enabled both emphasizing the importance of precariousness e.g. caused by fixed-term jobs and differentiating the vulnerability due to different characteristics of the employees by bridging these two ideas.