4. Discussion
depressive, depression, depressive symptoms
REGRESSION
There are already a wide variety of interventions for the unemployed to promote health and reemployment [The following hypotheses were examined.Hypothesis 1 of this evaluation was that the JOBS Program Germany succeeded in increasing IVG participants’ job search-specific self-efficacy levels. The IVG significantly increased from T0 to T1. Multivariate linear regression model 1 yielded a significant association of the treatment indicator variable with the level of job search-specific self-efficacy while controlling for the baseline level of the outcome. This result is consistent with previous JOBS Program evaluation studies [Hypotheses 2 to 4 referred to three different dimensions of health-related outcomes, namely (1) life satisfaction, (2) general health, and—more specifically—(3) mental health. Despite the small sample, all three outcomes yielded statistically significant and meaningful positive associations with the participation in JOBS Program Germany.To the best of our knowledge, “life satisfaction” has yet to be studied in JOBS Program evaluation studies. One comparable evaluation study by Proudfoot et al. [So far, the outcome “general health” has been examined only once within a JOBS Program evaluation study [Concerning the positive results in terms of mental health outcomes, there are several JOBS Program evaluation studies internationally that are in line with our findings concerning the improvement of, e.g., depressive symptoms due to the JOBS training [Hypothesis 5 and 6: The design of this study was oriented towards two previous studies from the United States and Finland [Previous studies in the USA and in Finland yielded positive effects. Therefore, we aimed to answer whether the JOBS Program will have similar effects for the unemployed in Germany, which has different labor markets, social security systems, and labor policies. However, if comparisons should be made, certain aspects that may influence the different study results should be considered. As we did not preselect a certain sample, e.g., based on specific demographic characteristics, not all study conditions could be replicated and therefore, our study differs from the Finnish study of Vuori et al. [Also, the different time points of data collection after the intervention need to be considered when comparisons are made. The time points varied between the focused studies from the USA (Vinokur et al. [Additionally, one needs to be aware of the different instruments used to collect data. To clarify, we can by and large successfully compare whether different studies have generally shown positive training effects, e.g., on depressive symptoms. However, it is not easy to directly compare the reported numbers of the different studies because we need to take into account the scale of measurement as well as the direction of the effect additionally to the “raw” numbers. Exemplarily, in Vinokur et al. (2000) [For a qualitative evaluation and the classification of the results, it is helpful to know the possible cut-off levels for the respective outcome and the level in the general population, possibly stratified for demographic characteristics like age groups.Taking this into account, we consider our results as relevant. First, for the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, a representative sample of the German general population showed for the age group of 41–60 years (which matches the mean age of our sample best) a mean level of depressive symptoms of 69.95 scale points [Second, this level of depressive symptoms in the IVG was only slightly above the cut-off score indicating screening for depression in clinical diagnosis (≤50 scale points; [Comparing the results of our study with those of the example studies to be confirmed, our results appear clearer: Apart from statistical significance (which is indicated in our results) the reduction in depressive symptoms by −0.06 scale points on a scale from 11 to 55 points [