Coping With the Psychological Challenges of Unemployment: Testing a Social Cognitive Model

Abstract

Increasingly, involuntary job loss is being seen as a normative career process, though one with significant effects on mental health and well-being. Coping with unemployment has most often been looked at through the lens of job search coping and re-employment outcomes, with fewer studies focused on coping with the psychological challenges of unemployment. This study adapts the social cognitive model of career self-management (Lent & Brown, 2013) to examine social cognitive predictors of well-being and psychological distress during unemployment. The psychometric properties of a revised coping behaviors measure and a new coping self-efficacy measure were examined with an initial sample of 196 unemployed respondents, yielding a 2-factor coping behaviors scale and a 1-factor psychological coping self-efficacy scale. The factor structures of these measures were confirmed in a second sample of unemployed respondents (n = 406) and, along with measures of proactive personality, financial strain, and social support, used to test the social cognitive coping model. The model offered good fit to the data and accounted for a substantial amount of the variance in well-being and psychological distress. Support was also found for most of the hypothesized paths. The study’s implications for practice and future research on coping with unemployment are discussed.