| Accumulating evidence shows a negative relationship between poor mental health status and employment, especially among women, but we know less about how mental health influences employment among low-income women. This dissertation provides evidence regarding the effects of mental health on employment transitions and labor force attachment among a unique sample of caregivers in poor families.;Data are from two waves of interviews from the Welfare, Children, and Families Three-City Study. The analytic sample consists of approximately 1,700 mothers in families with incomes below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level, in poor neighborhoods of Boston, San Antonio, and Chicago. Analyses focus on the effect of symptoms of prevalent mental disorders, measured using the 18-item Brief Symptom Inventory, on (1) employment transitions among jobless and employed women, and (2) labor force attachment between interviews.;Probit findings suggest a negative effect of baseline psychological distress on employment entry among jobless women. Among women employed at baseline, having a threshold level of psychological distress was a robust negative predictor of subsequent employment, suggesting that poor mental health affects job retention and stability.;Findings from two-limit tobit regressions of the proportion of time in employment between interviews indicated that distressed women were slightly more likely to hold a job at any point during the period, but conditional on employment, they spent less time holding jobs. This suggests the possibility of “job churning” and the need for further research incorporating job-specific data.;Symptoms of prevalent psychiatric syndromes may pose barriers to achieving stability in employment, and they may prevent socially marginalized women from entering employment altogether. For women with few skills and very low educational attainment mental health problems may derive from and compound stressors that impede employment entry. This research underscores the importance of improving access to mental health services for this population, through improved screening in multiple locations, for example, or through better coordination across public systems. Innovative efforts that address mental health issues on the job or in training may be helpful in improving job retention among the employed. |
