Post by account_disabled on Mar 6, 2024 0:53:58 GMT -5
A year-long study conducted by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine, California, United States; strongly suggests that smokers remain unemployed longer than non-smokers and that when people who smoke find work, they earn much less than those who do not have the habit. Previous studies have shown an association between smoking and unemployment in the United States and Europe, says the principal investigator of the work, Judith Prochaska, whose analysis was published yesterday in Archives of Internal Medicine. In previous work, her team found that unemployed job seekers in California were disproportionately more likely to be smokers than people who had jobs. But it was not clear whether smoking is the cause or consequence of unemployment. "We didn't know if smokers have a harder time finding work or if smokers are more likely to lose their jobs or that when non-smokers lose their jobs, they get stressed and start smoking," says Prochaska.
In a first step to establish whether smoking can actually prevent people from getting jobs, Prochaska and his team interviewed 131 unemployed smokers America Mobile Number List and 120 unemployed non-smokers at the beginning of the study and then at six and 12 months. "We saw that smokers spent more time looking for work than non-smokers," says Prochaska. At 12 months, only 27 percent of smokers had found work compared to 56 percent of non-smokers. And among those who had found a job within 12 months, smokers earned an average of $5 less per hour than non-smokers. "The health harms of smoking have been established for decades," says Prochaska, "and here our study provides information on the economic harms of smoking, both in terms of lower success in finding a job and lower wages." Prochaska and her colleagues used survey questions and a breath test to determine carbon monoxide levels in order to classify job seekers as daily smokers or non-smokers. Participants were not randomly assigned, and smokers and nonsmokers differed on many more important issues than whether they smoked or not.
For example, smokers were, on average, younger, less educated, and in poorer health than non-smokers, differences that can influence job seekers' ability to find work, Prochaska says. For this reason, the authors analyzed their data to control for these and other factors, such as duration of unemployment, race, and criminal history. "We designed the analysis of this study so that smokers and non-smokers were as similar as possible in terms of the information we had in their employment records and employment prospects at the beginning of the study," notes co-author Michael , assistant professor of Medicine who supervised the data analysis. After controlling for these variables, smokers still remained at a major disadvantage: After 12 months, the rate of smokers finding a job was 24 percent lower than that of non-smokers. In a follow-up study already underway, Prochaska and his team are testing an intervention that helps job seekers quit smoking, hypothesizing that successful quitters will need less time to get a job.
In a first step to establish whether smoking can actually prevent people from getting jobs, Prochaska and his team interviewed 131 unemployed smokers America Mobile Number List and 120 unemployed non-smokers at the beginning of the study and then at six and 12 months. "We saw that smokers spent more time looking for work than non-smokers," says Prochaska. At 12 months, only 27 percent of smokers had found work compared to 56 percent of non-smokers. And among those who had found a job within 12 months, smokers earned an average of $5 less per hour than non-smokers. "The health harms of smoking have been established for decades," says Prochaska, "and here our study provides information on the economic harms of smoking, both in terms of lower success in finding a job and lower wages." Prochaska and her colleagues used survey questions and a breath test to determine carbon monoxide levels in order to classify job seekers as daily smokers or non-smokers. Participants were not randomly assigned, and smokers and nonsmokers differed on many more important issues than whether they smoked or not.
For example, smokers were, on average, younger, less educated, and in poorer health than non-smokers, differences that can influence job seekers' ability to find work, Prochaska says. For this reason, the authors analyzed their data to control for these and other factors, such as duration of unemployment, race, and criminal history. "We designed the analysis of this study so that smokers and non-smokers were as similar as possible in terms of the information we had in their employment records and employment prospects at the beginning of the study," notes co-author Michael , assistant professor of Medicine who supervised the data analysis. After controlling for these variables, smokers still remained at a major disadvantage: After 12 months, the rate of smokers finding a job was 24 percent lower than that of non-smokers. In a follow-up study already underway, Prochaska and his team are testing an intervention that helps job seekers quit smoking, hypothesizing that successful quitters will need less time to get a job.