Abstract
This study investigates the associations between the psychological well-being of Taiwanese youths and their working and schooling behaviors during senior secondary education and beyond by applying rich longitudinal panel data and a random-effects estimation model. Four indexes for psychological well-being are considered: “happiness,” “mental disorder,” “physical disorder,” and “sleep disorder.” The results show that the associations between the psychological well-being of youths and their schooling and working behaviors from the ages of 19–24 are different from those from the ages of 16–18. Working at 19–24 years of age significantly reduces the degrees of loneliness, depression, and physical disorders, but this result does not hold for youths between the ages of 16 and 18. Regarding sleep disorders, youths who had jobs presented substantially fewer sleep disorders between the ages of 19 and 24 but more sleep disorders between ages 16 and 18. Youths who participated in labor market activities at 19–24 years of age were significantly happier than youths who were in school, while this association disappears when unobserved individual heterogeneity is taken into account.
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Notes
- 1.
The percentage of schooling and working at age 16 (wave 2) was so high due to students obtaining temporary jobs during the summer when the J3 sample transited from junior high school to senior high school.
- 2.
The distress questions were constructed from: “Have you had the following symptoms that make you uncomfortable? How severe?” The symptoms include “headache,” “feel dizzy,” “loneliness,” “depression,” “extreme worry,” “muscle pain,” “insomnia,” “numbness in some parts of the body,” “something stuck in your throat,” “weakness in some parts of your body,” “want to hit or hurt someone,” “awake early in the morning and can’t fall asleep thereafter,” “unstable sleep or wake up often,” “often quarrel with others,” “shout or throw things,” and “don’t want to live.” However, in each wave, the J3 sample was surveyed on 9–16 symptoms out of the above 16 symptoms. To ensure consistent measures through ages 16–24, we first select 9 symptoms which were questioned in every wave. They are “loneliness,” “depression,” “something stuck in your throat,” “weakness in some parts of the body,” “headache,” “numbness in some parts of the body,” “insomnia,” “awake early in the morning and can’t fall asleep,” and “unstable sleep or wake up often.” Then, we calculated the pairwise polychoric correlations among those 9 symptoms to measure the correlation of the underlying distributions of those categorical symptoms. The high polychoric correlation indicates the high degree of similarity between two symptoms. Accordingly, we grouped symptoms whose polychoric correlations were higher than 0.7 and combined them into one dimension disorder measure. Finally, we achieved three main dimensions of distress.
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Huang, FM., Chien, YN. (2012). Working, Schooling, and Psychological Well-Being: Evidence from Longitudinal Data for Taiwanese Youth. In: Yi, CC. (eds) The Psychological Well-being of East Asian Youth. Quality of Life in Asia, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4081-5_9
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