Youth Factors and Labour Market Experience in Job Satisfaction

What makes for satisfaction with life in general and with particular facets of life, such as those concerned with work, and counterpart feelings such as negative affect or depression have long been of interest to social scientists. One key question is whether these satisfactions and feelings are all parts of a personal or social predisposition to see things in positive or negative terms or whether we can identify distinct situational factors that underlie different forms of satisfaction. Moreover do these expressions fluctuate spasmodically in accordance with changes in external factors or gradually shift in accordance with long-term changing externalities? This paper focuses on two aspects of the conundrum. First, job satisfaction, compared across cohorts and genders, with a view to establishing what its components really are and whether they are changing. In addition we investigate Malaise, a general expression of a psychological state broadly aligned with what clinical psychologists describe as depression. We link both of these components of psychological state to general life satisfaction – the over arching view we have of our place in the world and our feelings about it.