Friday, May 16, 2025
5/16/2025
Employment Insecurity and Substance Use in U.S. Adults - PROJECT SUMMARY Employment insecurity (EI; unemployment or underemployment) may escalate substance use as a maladaptive coping mechanism for distress. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a rapid surge in EI for millions of Americans, hitting racial and ethnic minority and low socioeconomic status workers harder. The long-term impacts of the recent surge in EI on substance use are unknown. Employment recovery has been observed, but the speed has varied across subgroups and regional areas and future economic volatility looms. Despite robust cross-sectional associations of EI with substance use, prior studies have produced mixed results regarding the prospective effect of EI on substance use, its causal nature, and its differential impacts across racial and ethnic minority and low- SES workers. Moreover, the science base is unclear regarding which person-level factors are critical to address in interventions and how context-level factors intersect with person-level factors to buffer or amplify the impact of EI on substance use. National drug use surveys typically follow an annual or longer survey schedule that is not temporally granular enough to address these critical questions, leaving public officials without critical information to establish sound policies and practices related to EI as a means to reduce substance use. The proposed secondary data analysis study will address this challenge by isolating transitions in employment status (including underemployment) to elucidate the time course of effects (i.e., timing, duration, and trajectory of EI) on substance use. The study also will examine a targeted set of systemic environmental and individual factors that moderate the effects of EI on substance use and the mechanisms through which it affects substance use. We will anchor the inquiry in a novel conceptual model that synthesizes behavioral economic models of substance use with an ecological perspective. The model hypothesizes that people are motivated to engage in rewarding activities, and when critical sources that can bring rewards, such as full-time employment, are taken away, a cascading risk process is triggered, involving loss of financial and nonfinancial rewards, distress, mental health, and increased substance use. Environmental stressors and resources in the neighborhood may amplify or mitigate these forces. We will leverage the Understanding America Study (UAS), a nationally representative panel of 9,000-plus individuals. UAS involves high-frequency (biweekly from March 2020 to March 2021 and monthly thereafter until June 2022; 39 waves; 237,849 total observations) assessment of EI, substance use, financial and nonfinancial rewards, distress, and mental health. We will augment these intensive longitudinal data with neighborhood context data. The recent rapid surge in EI, its unknown long-term impacts on substance use, economic uncertainty, decades-long but unresolved debates regarding the causal nature of the EI– substance use link, and unknown interplay between person- and context-level factors that shapes the association of EI with substance use at the national level underscore the urgency and timeliness of this proposed study.
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