Del Rio-Chanona, R Maria;
Hermida-Carrillo, Alejandro;
Sepahpour-Fard, Melody;
Sun, Luning;
Topinkova, Renata;
Nedelkoska, Ljubica;
(2023)
Mental health concerns precede quits: shifts in the work discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic and great resignation.
EPJ Data Science
, 12
, Article 49. 10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00417-2.
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Abstract
To study the causes of the 2021 Great Resignation, we use text analysis and investigate the changes in work- and quit-related posts between 2018 and 2021 on Reddit. We find that the Reddit discourse evolution resembles the dynamics of the U.S. quit and layoff rates. Furthermore, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, conversations related to working from home, switching jobs, work-related distress, and mental health increased, while discussions on commuting or moving for a job decreased. We distinguish between general work-related and specific quit-related discourse changes using a difference-in-differences method. Our main finding is that mental health and work-related distress topics disproportionally increased among quit-related posts since the onset of the pandemic, likely contributing to the quits of the Great Resignation. Along with better labor market conditions, some relief came beginning-to-mid-2021 when these concerns decreased. Our study underscores the importance of having access to data from online forums, such as Reddit, to study emerging economic phenomena in real time, providing a valuable supplement to traditional labor market surveys and administrative data. / Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00417-2.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Mental health concerns precede quits: shifts in the work discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic and great resignation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00417-2 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00417-2 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Mental health, Quit, Great Resignation, Topic modelling, Labor market, COVID-19 |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10218122 |
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