The ‘double precarity’ of employment insecurity and unaffordable housing and its impact on mental health

R Bentley; E Baker; Z Aitken

Journal article

The ‘double precarity’ of employment insecurity and unaffordable housing and its impact on mental health

R Bentley, E Baker, Z Aitken

Social Science and Medicine | PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD | Published : 2019

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.02.008

Abstract

This paper describes who is most likely to experience household employment insecurity and housing affordability stress – double precarity – and estimates the degree to which housing affordability mediates the effect of employment insecurity on mental health. We use a cohort of 24,201 participants in 2016 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (6.2 repeated measures on average). We estimate the likelihood of onset of household employment insecurity, housing affordability stress and change in housing costs using longitudinal regression analyses for socio-demographic groups. We assess mediation by estimating how much exposure variable coefficients attenuate with inclusion of ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Rebecca Bentley Author

Zoe Aitken Author

Related Projects (2)

THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN DISABILITY ACQUISITION, SOCIO-ECONOMIC DISADVANTAGE AND HEALTH: A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF TRAJECTORIES OF DISABILITY

People with disabilities are more likely to live in disadvantaged circumstances and experience poorer health and wellbeing than people witho..

Unaffordable housing: impacts on socio-economic conditions and wellbeing

The project plans to explore how the current housing affordability crisis is shaping population wellbeing and socioeconomic outcomes. Housin..

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

R.B. and E.B. are funded by Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowships (FT150100131 and FT1401100872 respectively). Z.A. is funded by Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and a National Health and Medical Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship (1093740). The article uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this article, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either FaHCSIA or the Melbourne Institute.