Employment and the youth mental health crisis in Canada: distinct influences across phases of the school-to-work transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives Employment-related challenges and uncertainties are thought to contribute to the mental health crisis affecting young adults globally. Yet, few studies have examined how employment characteristics relate to young adults’ mental health. This study addresses this gap, considering how the role of employment might vary depending on young adults’ educational status and level. Methods A representative sample of 6,700 young adults (18–30 y.o.) drawn from Statistics Canada’s Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (2012–2020) was used to examine links between working hours and employment in a study-related job and mental health (life satisfaction, global mental health, psychological distress), beyond prior mental health and background characteristics. Interactions with student status were also incorporated. Results Among young adults in tertiary (university, college) education, mental health worsened as working hours increased. For all other participants, the opposite was observed: working more hours was associated with improved mental health. Overall, the best outcomes were observed among tertiary-enrolled students not working, and the worst among youth neither working nor in education. The size of the differences between these groups were non-negligible (with d ranging between 0.37 and 0.47). Across all groups, employment in a study-related job was marginally associated with higher life satisfaction (but not with psychological distress or global mental health). Conclusion Working hours contribute to young adults’ mental health in contrasting ways, depending on their position on the school-to-work transition continuum. Enhancing young adults’ access to meaningful employment in study-related jobs with an adapted schedule could help mitigate the youth mental health crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".