The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next regular seminar, which will be held as a zoom session on December, 3 at 16-30 p.m. (GMT+3). Natalia Soboleva (Senior Research Fellow, LCSR) will deliver a report “Subjective Well-Being as a Result of Labor Market Status Change in the Era of Coronavirus Pandemic”.

A link to zoom session will be sent after registration: https://lcsr.hse.ru/en/polls/421889823.html.

Coronavirus pandemic had a profound impact upon labor market. A lot of people lost their jobs, had to cut their working hours or started working from home Consequently, these changes should influence the individual level of subjective well-being. While Job loss definitely leads to lower level of subjective well-being working from home (WFH) may affect life satisfaction in different ways. On the one hand, WFH reduces social contacts with colleagues and makes the balance between work and family life more difficult. On the other hand, WFH allows saving time while commuting, increases job freedom, gives more opportunities for spending time with family and reduces health risks, which needs looking into. The dataset is the internet survey held in May-June of 2020 in 11 countries. On this stage, I focus upon Russia (1527 respondents). I will look at the role of socio-demographic characteristics and individual values as the possible predictors of the WFH upon well-being. I suppose that women and married with small kids may face more challenges when WFH, whereas individuals with higher education may be better prepared for WFH. According to the results, those who lost their jobs have a lower level of subjective well-being than those who did not lose their jobs. Those who are WFH do not differ in the level of subjective well-being from those who work offline. In addition to life satisfaction I consider satisfaction with work-life balance and with social relations as other aspects of subjective well-being.

Everyone interested is invited!

Working language is English.