Abstract
How labour market outcomes influence the life satisfaction of people have been studied by many scholars. In particular, prior studies have examined how perceived risk of losing one’s job affects one’s life satisfaction. We contribute to this literature by exploring whether fear of losing one’s job or not finding a job in Ghana influences one’s life satisfaction. We used data from Wave 6 of the World Values Survey to empirically examine whether job insecurity or fear of not finding a job was correlated with life satisfaction. Our results from OLS and logistic regressions show unambiguously that job insecurity did not exert a significant effect on life satisfaction among Ghanaians. We speculate several explanations for this finding, including the idea that the pervasiveness of the problem in Ghana may be the primary reason job insecurity was uncorrelated with life satisfaction in the country.
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Source World Values Survey Wave 6
Source World Values Survey Wave 6
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Notes
The results (not reported here for economy of space) are identical when we use this measure in its original, ordinal form. For the unemployed, this measure is rather called employability.
Detailed descriptions of these variables are provided on Table 1.
Verme (2009) argued that “freedom of choice and control over life” is more important than any other factor in predicting life satisfaction within and across countries.
The results are identical when the sample is further split into part time, full time, self-employed, and unemployed. Hence, we do not report them here for economy of space.
We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this to us.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this to us as a future research project.
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Sulemana, I., Bofah, R.O. & Nketiah-Amponsah, E. Job Insecurity and Life Satisfaction in Ghana. J Fam Econ Iss 41, 172–184 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09650-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09650-2