engleski

Psychological and financial deprivation and well-being of unemployed: who was (more) right - Jahoda or Fryer?

Many studies have shown that unemployment has a deleterious effect on the psychological wellbeing of the jobless individual. In comparison with employed, unemployed persons report higher levels of psychological distress and depression and lower level of self-esteem. Two confronted theories have been proposed to account for the negative impact of unemployment on psychological health: Jahoda's latent deprivation model (1981) and Fryer's agency restriction model (1986). According to Jahoda, employment provides both manifest (associated with income) and latent (associated with meeting psychological needs) benefits. Unemployment leeds to deprivation of these benefits, but it is the loss of the latent benefits that causes disturbances in psychological health. To the contrary, Fryer considers the loss of income (deprivation of manifest benefits of employment) as to be core negative consequence of unemployment. It reduces psychological health by impoverishing, restrictioning and discouraging one's agency. The aims of this study were to test each of the two models (Jahoda's and Fryer's) separately and to compare the relative importance of the deprivation of manifest and latent benefits in explaining differences in psychological health of the unemployed. The data were collected in 26 offices of Croatian Employment Bureau on representative sample of the unemployed in Croatia (N=1138) with assistance of 28 well trained pollsters. The analysis has shown significant negative correlation between psychological health and the deprivation of latent functions of employment (which confirms Jahoda's model). The negative correlation was found between psychological health and the lack of manifest benefits too (wich confirms Fryer's model). The comparison of two models has shown that deprivation of both latent and manifest benefits contributed significantly to the prediction of psychological health, with the deprivation of latent benefits accounting for larger proportion. These results indicate that two tested theoretical models are more complementary than contrary in explainig negative psychological consequences of unemployment.

unemployment; psychological deprivation; financial deprivation; psychological health

nije evidentirano