Date of Award

1-1-2022

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

School of Social Welfare

Content Description

1 online resource (x, 113 pages) : illustrations (some color), color map.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Lynn Warner

Committee Members

Loretta Pyles, Peter D Brandon

Keywords

capability approach, indonesia, mental health, wormen's work, Women, Capabilities approach (Social sciences)

Subject Categories

Social Work

Abstract

Most research on women and work in developing countries has focused on factors and contexts that shape women’s employment choices and options, gender segregation in the labor market, and the meaning of work for women. Studies on the outcomes or consequences of work are less common and tend to focus on income as the primary outcome of interest. Using a combined capability and feminist framework, this study identified Indonesian women’s work patterns and their relationship to women’s mental health. The capability approach was used to choose work outcomes that are not merely income-based, while the feminist perspective was used to expand the definition of “work” beyond those included in typical labor force data and that might affect mental health. Data came from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), which is a longitudinal panel study of Indonesians’ socioeconomic conditions. The analytic sample for this study was 3,976 female respondents with 27-years of complete work history information. Analyses were conducted in two steps: (i) sequence and cluster analysis to identify women’s work history typologies and (ii) multiple linear regression to estimate the association between work history type and mental health.The sequence and cluster analysis yielded a four-category typology. Based on the number of years spent in a particular work status and the number of transitions into or out of that work status, the four categories were described as unstable wage work (such as being paid employees), stable self-employment (such as owning a small business), stable domestic work (care work and household work), and unstable unpaid family worker (such as working on a family’s farm or business but without getting paid). This analysis also revealed that women’s work histories in Indonesia that majority of women participated in informal economy, either working as self-employed or as unpaid non-domestic work. Transitions between the formal and informal sectors were infrequent: self-employed women tended to remain self-employed, and women who participated in unpaid work either persisted as unpaid family workers, or transitioned to and from not working. The regression analyses showed that work history type was not significantly associated with mental health, as measured by total depression score. Rather, it was work instability (i.e., the number of transitions from one work category to another) that had a significant association with mental health. Women with more frequent work transitions had poorer mental health, even after controlling for other factors associated with poor mental health (i.e., prior mental illness and current health condition). Because this study used secondary data, one of the limitations pertains to the measurement of key variables. Work history was only captured annually and potentially missed any transitions that were less than a year. Another limitation relates to the use of secondary data to capture capability: while IFLS has rich information, it was not designed to capture capability and functionings. Despite these limitations, this study offers to fill the gap in literature regarding mental health issues and work history in the developing countries. This study is among the first to examine the non-monetary well-being outcome of work. Findings from this study suggest that future research on factors associated with women’s participation in the labor market and research on mental health issues in developing countries context are warranted. There is also the need for policy support for women to find work that provides decent income and working condition for women. Since there are limited studies of Indonesian mental well-being, future research could explore the prevalence of mental health in various populations subgroups and factors that might exacerbate or prevent mental health problems. Social workers working in programs for women’s employment should also pay attention on addressing barriers for women to get work that promotes their overall well-being these barriers and to expand women’s access to employment and to mental health services.

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