Validation of the Employment Precariousness Scale and its associations with mental health outcomes: results from a prospective community-based study of pregnant women and their partners in Dresden, Germany

Abstract

Objective To translate the Employment Precariousness Scale (EPRES) from Spanish into German (EPRES-Ge), adapt it to the German context, assess the psychometric properties and show prospective associations with mental health outcomes within the peripartum period.Design Analyses encompassed descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to validate the structure of the EPRES, and multivariate regression analyses with mental health outcomes 8 weeks after birth.Participants Self-report data from 3,455 pregnant women and their partners within the Dresden Study on Parenting, Work, and Mental Health prospective longitudinal cohort study were used.Results The EPRES-Ge with five dimensions and 20 items showed good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=0.77). All scales showed good reliability coefficients of α=0.73–0.85 and good item-subscale correlations of r=0.63–0.98, with the exception of subscale rights, which showed poor reliability of α=0.30 and item-subscale correlations of r=0.45–0.68. Exploratory analysis and CFA confirmed the proposed five-dimensional structure, explaining 45.08% of the cumulative variance. Regression analyses with mental health outcomes after birth revealed statistically significant associations (β=0.12–0.20).Conclusions The EPRES-Ge is a valuable tool for assessing employment precariousness as a multidimensional construct. The scales could be adapted to the German working context. Precarious employment, as measured by the EPRES-Ge, is a determinant of mental health problems in young families.