Elsevier

The Lancet

Volume 350, Issue 9071, 12 July 1997, Pages 96-100
The Lancet

Articles
Effect of cognitive-behavioural training on job-finding among long-term unemployed people

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(96)09097-6Get rights and content

Summary

Background

The principles of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) have been applied successfully through individual psychotherapy to several psychiatric disorders. We adapted these principles to create a group-training programme for a non-psychiatric group—long-term (>12 months) unemployed people. The aim was to investigate the effects of the programme on measures of mental health, job-seeking, and job-finding.

Methods

289 volunteers (of standard occupational classification professional groups) were randomly assigned to a CBT or control programme, matched for all variables other than specific content, that emphasised social support. 244 (134 CBT, 110 control) people started the programmes and 199 (109 CBT, 90 control) completed the whole 7 weeks of weekly 3 h sessions (including three CBT, seven control participants who withdrew because they obtained employment or full-time training). Questionnaires completed before training, on completion, and 3–4 months later (follow-up data available for 94 CBT, 89 control) assessed mental health, job-seeking activities, and success in job-finding. Analyses were based on those who completed the programmes. Participants were not aware that two interventions were being used. Investigators were aware of group allocation, but were accompanied in all programmes by co-trainers who were non-investigators.

Findings

Before training, 80 (59%) CBT-group participants and 59 (54%) controls scored 5 or more on the general health questionnaire (GHQ; taken to define psychiatric caseness). After training, 29 (21%) and 25 (23%), respectively, scored 5 or more (p<0·001 for both decreases). Improvements in mean scores with training on the GHQ (between-group difference 3·91, p=0·05) and in other measures of mental health were significantly greater in the CBT group than in the control group. There were no significant differences between the groups in job-seeking activity during or after training, but significantly more of the CBT group than of the control group had been successful in finding full-time work (38 [34%] vs 13 [13%], p<0·001), by 4 months after completion of training.

Interpretation

These results suggest that group CBT training can improve mental health and produce tangible benefits in job-finding. Application of CBT among the unemployed is likely to benefit both individuals and society in general.

Introduction

People attribute events, particularly successes and failures, to causes, whether they are real or imagined.1 Such causal attributions may be classified in several dimensions, such as internality (due to oneself or to external factors), stability, pervasiveness, and controllability.2 These dimensions can be used to measure, by questionnaire,3 or content analysis,4 an individual's characteristic attributional style, which correlates with susceptibility to clinical depression5 and physical illness,6 risk of relapse in depression,7 low motivation and poor achievement in education and athletics,8 job satisfaction,9 and sales performance.10, 11 Individuals who typically attribute their failures to internal, stable, and global factors, and their successes to external, temporary, and specific causes, are most vulnerable to poor persistence, impaired performance, and depression.12 Clinically, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) can modify attributional style,7 and can have beneficial effects in depression13 and other psychiatric disorders.14

Unemployment is associated with personal, financial, and social restrictions, which can affect psychological health.15 The proportion of unemployed people who score above the cut-off point for “psychiatric caseness” on the general health questionnaire (GHQ)16 is typically 60%, compared with 20% among employed groups.17 Long-term unemployment typically brings further difficulties, such as psychological changes that can prevent re-employment.18 Reduced self-esteem, self-efficacy, and expectations of success all decrease the likelihood of a successful outcome in job-seeking, or may reduce the motivation to seek work at all. Many long-term unemployed people cease to believe in their ability to regain employment.19 The personal cost of unemployment can, therefore, be substantial. There are also, of course, substantial costs to society.

There is a clear need for interventions to assist unemployed people to reduce the negative psychological impacts of unemployment and to help them back into work. However, little psychological assistance is given. Most re-employment programmes aim to clarify job goals, to provide job-seeking or job-related skills, or to resocialise unemployed people to the work environment. There have been few empirically assessed interventions, and those assessed so far have proved to be of little use.20 Three studies that described psychological interventions, however, have reported encouraging results. A programme to improve self-efficacy in job-seeking led to higher rates of re-employment; job-search behaviour was the major mediator through which high self-efficacy was converted into re-employment.19 A social-support and problem-solving intervention resulted in increases in quantity and quality of re-employment, but no difference in job-seeking behaviour.21 Expressive writing by job-seekers about the thoughts and feelings surrounding job loss increased re-employment success, but did not change job-seeking behaviour.22 To date, however, no psychological intervention derived from an empirically validated psychotherapy technique has been formally investigated.

Our occupational training programme, based on the principles of CBT (table 1), aims to help people identify and modify their attributional style. We assessed the effectiveness of the programme in a group of long-term unemployed professional people, who were likely to experience repeated failure in job-finding. We compared the effects on mental health, job-seeking activities, and success in job-finding with those of a social-support programme in a similar control group. The primary outcome measure of the study was obtaining full-time employment.

Section snippets

Methods

Professional people of standard occupational classification23 groups 1, 2, 3, and 7 (managerial, administrative, professional, technical, and sales) who had been unemployed for longer than 12 months were recruited via newspaper advertisements, mail shots, the UK Employment Service, and a major out-placement company (Sanders & Sidney). Calculations to ascertain the sample size needed for sufficient statistical power were based on the endpoint of change in attributional style (effect size

Results

A score on the GHQ of 5 or above is taken to indicate “psychiatric caseness”. At entry to the trial 80 (59%) of CBT-assigned participants and 59 (54%) control-assigned participants scored 5 or higher (p=0·42). The overall proportion (57%) is similar to that in previous reports on unemployed people.17 After training, the proportion scoring 5 or higher on the GHQ was significantly reduced in both the CBT group (to 29 [21%], p<0·001) and the control group (to 25 [23%], p<0·001), but again the

Discussion

Our results show that the principles of CBT can be applied in disciplines other than psychiatry, in which they were first developed. There were greater improvements in the CBT than in the control group on several measures of mental health, though the controls also improved (figure 2). Participation in the CBT programme produced substantial changes in job-finding, a good measure of real-life performance. Compared with participants assigned to the social-support programme, almost three times as

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