A Psychosocial Development Approach to Understanding Youth Work Outcomes: An Exploratory Study Utilizing National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) Data

Background/Purpose: The problem of youth unemployment has been traditionally understood through an economics lens and reduced to the simple binary outcome of employment status. Nonetheless, such a conceptualization ignores the psychological and social aspects of work, as well as the various dimensions of employment. The purpose of this exploratory study is to take a psychosocial development approach to understanding the problem of youth unemployment by testing for the relationship between psychosocial development factors and five dimensions of employment: occupation type, annual hours worked, average annual wage per hours worked, annual paid time off, and job satisfaction. The study leveraged Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, which identifies four factors as the drivers of psychosocial development in the first five pre-adult stages: family (stages one to three), school experiences (stage four), peers and friends (stages four and five), and the ability to make work choices (stage five).

Methods: Data and samples: Data on all participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) born in 1980 was collected.  Screening the variables for missing data led to a final total sample of 178 observations.

Measures: To test the effects of psychosocial development factors on work outcomes, four clusters of independent variables were created: (a) family, (b) school academics, (c) peers, and (d) early work preparation.  The work quality variables used were extracted from the 2005 survey, when the participants were 24 or 25 years old.  These were: (a) occupation type, (b) total annual hours worked, (c) average annual wage per hours worked, (d) annual paid time off, and (e) job satisfaction.  Gender, ethnicity, and family net worth were used as control variables.

Results: Linear and logistic regressions revealed that the amount of the variance the clusters explained in each of the five models varied, suggesting that all of the psychosocial development clusters are important to a comprehensive system of positive work outcomes.  The school academics cluster explained most of the variance in the occupation type and job satisfaction models, the family cluster in the annual hours worked and paid time off models, and the peers cluster in the average wage per hour worked model. Contrary to economic thought, the early work preparation cluster did not rank highly in any of the models based on the percentage of the explained variance. This is especially surprising given the more direct connection between the variables in the cluster to the work outcomes.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings provide support for the need to push beyond the strict treatment of the youth unemployment problem as one of economics and employment status and to redefine it in a way that accounts for psychological and social circumstances and a more multidimensional concept of employment. It also provides support for Erikson’s psychosocial development theory, which posits that individuals’ work roles and choices are extensions of their psychosocial development. As such, work outcomes themselves are developmental, and understanding them necessitates a consideration of experiences related to family, school, peers, and early work experiences, not just economics.