Tessa Bonney
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
More and more jobs in the United States have become insecure: short contracts, unstable hours, low pay, few protections. These conditions, called employment precarity, may affect workers' mental and behavioral health, including psychological distress and substance use.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
employment precarity
precarious work
job insecurity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Define measures of employment precarity and employment variability, including job changes and gaps in work, and describe how they change over time using the NLSY79 and NLSY97 national survey cohorts.
- Characterize disparities between demographic groups in precarious work trajectories and in total employment variability, to identify key risk factors for holding insecure jobs.
- Model whether long-term trajectories of employment precarity and variability are associated with substance use, using longitudinal statistical analysis of the two NLSY cohorts.
More about the research
Behavioral health problems are common among working-age adults and cost workplaces a great deal of lost productivity. Yet few US studies have measured precarious work fully, followed it over many years, or counted job loss and job changes as part of a person's work history.
Why it matters
Workers in insecure jobs may face higher risks of distress and substance misuse, and these problems cost US workplaces heavily in lost productivity. By showing how unstable work histories relate to behavioral health across the life course, and which groups are most exposed to precarious work, this research could point to where interventions on work conditions, psychological distress and substance misuse are most needed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Robert Crosnoe
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science
Document whether exposure to family member deaths in childhood and adolescence predicts unstable trajectories of socioeconomic attainment, family-building, and health in young adulthood, using longitudinal causal-inference techniques on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.
Solveig Argeseanu Cunningham
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Harmonize and bridge seven national cohort datasets, including Add Health, PSID, REGARDS and HRS, into a synthetic, nationally representative cohort that tracks chronic disease from age 30.
Michael Vuolo
Ohio State University, OH·Public Health & Epidemiology
Estimate how disaster declarations from the FEMA Disaster Declaration Database affect county-level drug-related deaths and drug arrests, using quasi-experimental designs that compare counties over time with CDC mortality and FBI Uniform Crime Reports data.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
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