Understanding Non-medical Correlates of Health and Health Disparities in Emerging Work Contexts - Working-aged American adults spend large portions of their days engaged in work—a major non-medical correlate of health. The growth of non-standard work arrangements in the United States has had detrimental impacts on the health and well-being of workers. These evolving arrangements are defined as emergent work (EW), or contemporary work that is outside of traditional full-time employment, expected to end, lacking an implicit or explicit contract, and/or precarious. This national trend towards EW may also exacerbate health disparities in workers who engage in such work. Developing a nuanced understanding of EW and its relationship to health, well-being, and health disparities is essential for improving population health in the United States. Toward this end, this project includes a comprehensive training plan and integrative investigation of EW in California, a state at the forefront of this labor market trend. The project PI is a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Southern California’s Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. The PI will work with a mentorship team of worker health and methods experts to complete a multi-method study of the state-wide California Work and Health Survey, a comprehensive study of work and health factors in 4,104 workers from the California labor force. Aim 1 will identify latent classes of EW among workers aligned with contemporary work arrangements. Aim 2 will characterize contemporary EW based on worker demographics, health, and well-being. Aim 3 will examine workers’ lived experiences of participation in EW relative to health and well-being. Completing these scientific aims will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of objective and subjective factors influencing health and well-being in EW and provide insight into personal factors informing the relationships between EW and potential health disparities. Concurrent didactic, project-based, and professional development activities will complement mentorship and pursuit of these three aims. Specifically, training in data science and survey analysis methods will support the completion of Aims 1 and 2, and instruction in qualitative methods will support the completion of Aim 3. Coursework will be completed to advance understanding of work as a non-medical correlate of health and research methods, and efforts will be directed toward professional development and dissemination. These integrative experiences with a mentored research project and a comprehensive training plan will launch the PI’s career as a junior scientist interested in understanding non-medical correlates of health in workers and addressing worker health disparities. This project aligns with the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparity’s research concept about the role of work in health disparities in the United States, as well as the Healthy People 2030 initiative’s focus on the work and the workplace as community-level correlates of health.
