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PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1347966
This article is part of the Research Topic Quality of Life in Academia: New Perspectives for Assessing and Promoting Wellbeing in University Population View all 9 articles

All that glitters is not gold! Job insecurity and Well-being in STEM Research Fellows: a latent profile analysis

Provisionally accepted
Giulia Bacci Giulia Bacci 1Sara Viotti Sara Viotti 2*Lara Bertola Lara Bertola 3Daniela Converso Daniela Converso 1Barbara Loera Barbara Loera 1
  • 1 Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Piedmont, Italy
  • 2 University of Turin, Turin, Italy
  • 3 Department of Management and Organisation, Rennes School of Business, Rennes, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Job insecurity is now one of the major stressors affecting well-being at work. In academia, researchers appear to be in the most precarious position. To explore the relationship between job insecurity and well-being at work, we analyzed a sample of research fellows belonging to STEM disciplines in Italy. Using a latent profile approach, we identified three "hidden" subgroups: "Safe & Sound"; "Safe not so Sound" and "Neither Safe or Sound".Compared to previous studies, our results show that even within a population of STEM researchers that tends to have good levels of employability and mobility, there are subgroups of people characterized by greater job insecurity and low work commitment, who suffer from emotional exhaustion and cynicism at work level, i.e. more exposed to the risk of burnout.

    Keywords: job insecurity1, Academia2, researchers3, work-related stress4, Work engagement5, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA)6. (Min.5-Max. 8

    Received: 01 Dec 2023; Accepted: 08 May 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Bacci, Viotti, Bertola, Converso and Loera. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sara Viotti, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

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