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Reciprocal relationships between employment status and psychological symptoms: findings from the Building a New Life in Australia study

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Abstract

Background

Finding work is an important priority for many refugees in the initial years following settlement in a host country. Difficulties in finding work could conceivably both contribute to and be a consequence of symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psychological distress commonly reported by refugees.

Purpose

We sought to determine the direction of these relationships and the possibility of a reciprocal association between employment status on one hand, and symptoms of PTSD and psychological distress on the other, in a large refugee sample.

Methods

A secondary analysis of three face-to-face interview assessments conducted across 5 years with 894 adult refugee participants (M = 39.9 years, SD = 12.8) from the Building a New Life in Australia study was conducted. Symptoms of psychological distress, posttraumatic stress, and employment status were assessed on each occasion. Preliminary analysis identified the cross-sectional relationships between psychological distress, PTSD symptoms, and employment status, while cross-lagged models were used to identify the longitudinal relationships between these respective symptoms.

Results

Symptoms of psychological distress and not being in paid work were significantly correlated with each other at each time point (ranging 0.09–0.25) and they reciprocally influenced each other over time. Likewise, PTSD symptoms and not being in paid work were correlated with each other after 3 years and 5 years (r = 0.21 and 0.23 respectively), and a reciprocal relationship between these was found over time.

Conclusion

The current findings indicate that interventions which target either mental health or work opportunities could have multiple downstream benefits for refugees.

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Availability of data and materials

The data from the BNLA study can be accessed through the National Centre for Longitudinal Data (NCLD) of the Australian Government Department of Social Services via the Dataverse platform. (https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/dataverse/bnla) with appropriate approval.

Code availability

Requests for analysis scripts and code can be sent to the corresponding author at david.berle@uts.edu.au.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Discipline of Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Health, University of Technology, Broadway, PO Box 123, Sydney, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Alana Garton, Kris Rogers & David Berle

  2. The George Institute for Global Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Kris Rogers

  3. School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    David Berle

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  1. Alana Garton
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  2. Kris Rogers
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  3. David Berle
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Correspondence to David Berle.

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The current study gained approval from the Australian Data Archive to access and report on the data. Ethics approval was obtained from the University of Technology Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC no: 2018002456-14).

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All participants provided informed consent to participate.

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All the authors reviewed the final manuscript prior to submission and provided consent for the manuscript to be submitted for publication.

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Garton, A., Rogers, K. & Berle, D. Reciprocal relationships between employment status and psychological symptoms: findings from the Building a New Life in Australia study. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 57, 1085–1095 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-021-02204-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-021-02204-8

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