Comparing Precarious Employment Across Countries: Measurement Invariance of the Employment Precariousness Scale for Euro
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Comparing Precarious Employment Across Countries: Measurement Invariance of the Employment Precariousness Scale for Europe (EPRES-E) Eva Padrosa1,2 · Mireia Bolíbar1,2,3 · Mireia Julià1,2 · Joan Benach1,2,4 Accepted: 1 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Comparing precarious employment (PE) across countries is essential to deepen the understanding of the phenomenon and to learn from country-specific experiences. However, this is hampered by the lack of internationally meaningful measures of PE. We aim to address this point by assessing the measurement invariance (MI) of the Employment Precariousness Scale for Europe (EPRES-E), an adaptation of the EPRES construct in the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS). EPRES-E consists of 13 proxy-indicators sorted into six dimensions: temporariness, disempowerment, vulnerability, wages, exercise of rights, unpredictable working times. Drawing on EWCS-2015, MI of the second-order factor model was tested in a sample of 31,340 formal employees by means of (a) multi-group confirmatory factor analyses, and (b) the substantive exploration of EPRES-E mean scores in each country. The results demonstrate that threshold invariance holds for the first-order structure (dimensions) of 22 countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK), but only metric invariance is attained by the second-order structure. The latter is supported by the exploration of mean scores, where we found that different score patterns in each dimension lead to similar overall EPRES-E scores, suggesting that PE is configured by different sources within the six dimensions in each country according to their broader socio-political trajectories. We conclude that, although EPRES-E can be used for comparative purposes in 22 European countries, the scores of each dimension must be reported alongside the overall EPRES-E score. Keywords Precarious employment · Europe · Measurement invariance · Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis · Comparative research
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-020-02539-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Eva Padrosa [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Introduction Post-industrial societies have experienced a set of pivotal processes in recent decades, including the globalization of their economies, far-reaching technological innovations prompting the so-called fourth industrial revolution, the development of neoliberal macroeconomic policies, periodic economic downturns and demographic changes. Among other consequences, these have triggered a structural transformation of labor markets. Broadly, the unprecedented post-WWII socioeconomic order that gave rise to the Standard Employment Relationship (SE
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