Risk Factors of Employment Transitions from Age 16 To 55 Years: A British Cohort Study

Abstract

Health, educational and socioeconomic status have been thought to be related to employment transitions in mid-life, but little is known about what the associations really are and how the associations change over time for British individuals. The purpose of this research is to investigate relationships between these factors and employment transitions for men and women in a British cohort. This paper uses the data set 1958 NCDS, and the method multiple imputation to impute the data, uses forward-backward stepwise regression to select variables and combine using average and weighted average to treat repeated measures. Lifetabe and Kaplan-Meier methods are used to show the distribution of duration to employment transitions. The discrete-time logit model of survival analysis is required to build the relationship between first employment, first unemployment and factors including health status, educational performance and socioeconomic background. Our findings suggest more attention should be paid to improve health conditions, educational levels and socioeconomic background of individuals before age 16, which could shorten the time to first employment and reduce the possibility to be unemployed.