Are Young English People’s Attitudes Towards Employment Indicative of Whether They Have Spent a Large Proportion of Their Adult Lives Unemployed?

Some leading UK politicians have claimed that a culture of welfare dependency exists and that a sizeable number of unemployed benefit claimants lack an appropriate commitment to employment. Such claims were used to justify the 2012 Welfare Reform Act’s new measures to steer unemployed claimants towards applying for and retaining jobs they might not want. The statistical analysis presented here is the first to explore possible connections between people’s attitudes towards disliked/unattractive jobs, their parents’ employment status, and the total time they have spent in unemployment. Logistic regression analysis used Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)/Next Steps data on people born in 1989/90 to predict whether they spent an unusually long time unemployed between age eighteen and twenty-five; an attitude favouring joblessness over a disliked/unattractive job was a nonsignificant predictor in eleven of twelve multivariate models, and a weak predictor (OR = 1.32) in the other.