Documents Goodman, William 7 results

"Background Unemployment has consistently been linked to negative mental health outcomes, emphasising the need to characterise the underlying mechanisms. The current study aimed at testing whether compared with other employment groups, fewer leisure activities observed in unemployment may contribute to elevated risk for negative mental health via loss of time structure.Methods Depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression), leisure activities (exercise, self-focused, social), and time structure (Time Structure Questionnaire (TSQ)) were assessed cross-sectionally in 406 participants (unemployed=155, employed=140, homemakers=111) recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk.Results Controlling for gender and age, structural equation modelling revealed time structure partially (employed, homemakers) and fully (unemployed) mediated the relationship between leisure activities and depressive symptoms. With the exception of differential effects for structured routines, all other TSQ factors (sense of purpose, present orientation, effective organisation and persistence) contributed significantly to all models.Conclusions These findings support the idea that especially for the unemployed, leisure activities impose their mental health benefits through increasing individuals' perception of spending their time effectively. Social leisure activities that provide a sense of daily structure may thereby be a particularly promising low-cost intervention to improve mental health in this population."

"The trends of employment in hospitals are atypical in comparison to those in other industries. Hospital jobs are more than resistant to recessions; the changes in hospital employment are countercyclical. This article first takes up influences other than the business cycle and then explains the countercyclical pattern of growth in employment. The clearest statistical relationship found with employment in all hospitals is the inverse relation between the growth rate of hospital employment and that of total payroll employment. In the article, the Current Employment Statistics survey is the primary source of statistics representing employment. "