1. Introduction
infection, depressive, depressive symptoms
REGRESSION, INFECTION, SECONDARY, RECRUITMENT
Compared to the employed, the unemployed suffer from poorer health, especially in terms of mental health. At the same time, health promotion rarely reaches unemployed people. The “JOBS Program” is an intervention to promote health and labor market integration and has shown positive effects in the USA and Finland. In this confirmatory study, we investigated whether the JOBS Program achieves similar effects in Germany. We applied a randomized controlled trial to compare an intervention group (IVG) with a waiting control group (WCG) before (T0; N = 94) and shortly after (T1; n = 65) the intervention. Concerning our primary outcomes, the JOBS Program Germany was beneficial: Compared to the WCG, the regression estimated that the IVG had (1) a 2.736 scale point higher level of life satisfaction (In August 2023, the unemployment rate in Germany was 5.7%, with 2,695,827 unemployed people. Of these, 929,000 were long-term unemployed (34.5%) [First, the “Latent Deprivation Model” according to Jahoda (1983) [Second, the “Vitamin Model” created by Peter Warr lists from 9 to 12 “principal aspects of any environments” ([Third, the “Agency Restriction Theory” described by David Fryer (1986) [Internationally, there is a whole range of interventions for the unemployed that address mental health, with the aim of facilitating labor market integration [Since 2020, the JOBS Program has also been offered in Germany as “JOBS Program Germany” as a pilot project within the overarching large-scale program called “Linking of Employment and Health Promotion in the Community Setting”. Hereby the Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds (GKV-Spitzenverband) cooperated with the German Federal Employment Agency.It is not self-evident that an already internationally positively evaluated intervention shows the same effects under the conditions in another country because the practical implementation and its outcomes can depend on the country-specific labor market structure and the health and social security systems, respectively. Therefore, the pilot implementation of the JOBS Program in Germany was scientifically accompanied and evaluated by the University of Kassel to examine whether it had similar effects in Germany. In this sense, this study was confirmatory in nature and was intended to follow the methods and objectives of the abovementioned evaluation studies that have successfully been conducted by Vinokur et al. (2000) [This confirmatory study examined the effects of the JOBS Program on the job search-specific self-efficacy and on health-related outcomes such as life satisfaction and depressive symptoms among the unemployed in Germany. Of secondary interest were moderating factors like the duration of unemployment and the baseline level of depressive symptoms. Despite numerous difficulties in the participant recruitment and the practical training implementation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns and other infection control measures, seven JOBS trainings took place, with 94 unemployed individuals participating in the first interview (T0, before the training), and we are able to report relevant results on the intervention effects related to job search-specific self-efficacy, life satisfaction, and general and mental health outcomes.Concerning these outcomes, we hypothesized that the intervention group would report (1) higher levels of job search-specific self-efficacy and (2) life satisfaction, (3) to assess their general health status more favorably, and (4) to have lower levels of depressive symptoms compared to the waiting control group.Following the study design and methods of the studies mentioned above, we also examined previously identified effect moderations. We hypothesized (5) that the level of depressive symptoms before the JOBS Program training (hereafter “JOBS training”) will moderate the effect of the intervention on mental health, in the way that the training would show stronger effects among those who suffered more from depressive symptoms. We also hypothesized (6) that the duration of unemployment before the JOBS training will also moderate the training effects on mental health.