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Record W4416056394 · doi:10.1080/07294360.2025.2559649

What are the emotional burdens of precarious educators working in the higher education sector? <i>A scoping review</i>

2025· article· en· W4416056394 on OpenAlexaff
Lisa McKendrick-Calder, Sarah Smith, Julia Choate, Jessica Nelson

Bibliographic record

VenueHigher Education Research & Development · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicEmployment and Welfare Studies
Canadian institutionsMacEwan University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRemunerationHigher educationFeelingEmotional exhaustionEmotional laborWork (physics)Work environmentPrecarious workThematic analysis

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The use of precariously employed educators is increasing in the global higher education (HE) sector, with many struggling to gain long-term employment and experiencing emotional burden. Scholars report that unpredictable job security, ambiguous career progression, and inadequate remuneration can detrimentally impact precarious educators. This scoping review aimed to uncover and synthesize the literature related to emotional burdens for precariously employed educators in HE. A systematic search across five databases was conducted, and 38 studies published between 2012 and 2023 were included. Analysis revealed four main categories of emotional burden: (1) exclusion or disconnection, (2) feeling undervalued, (3) stress and (4) anxiety. These were mapped to themes of job satisfaction, personal health and wellbeing, career progression, and the work environment. We conclude that precarious educators bear complex emotional burdens. The implications of these could be critically explored and considered by educators, administrators, researchers, and policymakers to work towards more inclusive and equitable academic environments.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.012
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.065
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.061

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0120.065
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.003
Bibliometrics0.0100.007
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0070.005
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0030.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.140
GPT teacher head0.504
Teacher spread0.363 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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