WorkRelated Demands Emanating from Social Change

Authors: Astrid Körner Rainer K Silbereisen Uwe Cantner

Publish Date: 2012/12/05

Volume: 115, Issue: 1, Pages: 203-222

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Abstract

Following current macrolevel social change people are increasingly confronted with new demands encompassing perceived uncertainties concerning their job and career prospects Studies utilizing concurrent assessments showed that perceiving a high accumulation “load” of such demands is negatively related to individuals’ subjective wellbeing Without further evidence the interpretation of the direction of these effects however is equivocal Based on the concept that individuals have a rather stable traitlike level of subjective wellbeing from which they may vary when confronted with changes of the external ecology the current study examined the relationship between the reported load of demands and subjective wellbeing assessed as general life satisfaction and average satisfaction in domains of life ie family work finances and leisure We expected that a higher load of demands corresponds to a temporary decline in wellbeing while at the same time differences in the stable traitlike level of wellbeing account for differences in the reported demand load For the purpose of our study we analyzed three annual waves of assessment of German adults aged between 18 and 43 years N = 488 Utilizing a traitstateoccasion model we separated traitlike aspects of wellbeing from occasionspecific deviations Overall our results confirmed our expectation that effects indeed run in both directions The higher the reported load of workrelated demands the more respondents’ wellbeing negatively deviated from the stable traitlike level Beyond that a higher traitlike level of wellbeing corresponded to a lower demand load Both effects revealed almost equal strength and remained stable after controlling for participants’ employment status family status and educational attainmentThis study was supported by a grant from the German Research Council Project “Psychosocial resources and coping with social change” PI Rainer K Silbereisen as part of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 580 “Social developments in postsocialist societies Discontinuity tradition structural transformation” The first author received a scholarship of the Jena Graduate School “Human Behaviour in Social and Economic Change” GSBC funded by the Federal Program “ProExzellenz” of Thuringia

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