Trajectories of job search and wellbeing among reentering individuals

• In Event: Building promising scholars of the future: NIJ’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

This research, funded in part by NIJ’s Graduate Research Fellowship program, contributes a detailed understanding of job searching and employment after prison through the collection of real-time observed behavior and self-report data via smartphones. It focuses on emotional wellbeing, social contacts, and geographic mobility for searching and employment. It tests an experimental intervention for sharing job information and social support, which can easily be adopted by reentry service providers. Participants (n=156) were sampled from a complete census of recent releases in partnership with the Newark, New Jersey parole office, and were followed via smartphones for three months. The NIJ GRF program supports my final year in graduate school, enabling me to focus full-time on the analysis of data produced by the project. The methods for analyzing high frequency, longitudinal smartphone data are not straightforward, and the GRF program allows me the time to produce a dissertation that incorporates the appropriate analytic approaches. As importantly, the application review process provided me with valuable feedback from experts in the area on both the project design and the proposed analytic methods. These suggestions were incorporated in the project, and they have improved the final dissertation.

Author

• Naomi Sugie, Princeton University