Barrier to Employment among Unemployed Drug Users: Age Predicts Severity

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Drugs users in treatment or exiting treatments face many barriers to employment when entering the job market. Those barriers may consist of job-specific “hard skills” such as ability to work on a personal computer. In addition to hard skill insufficiencies, unemployed drugs users may lack of general “soft skill” such as punctuality and interpersonal communication skill. To tackle this problem we design two studies to examine the existence and extension of specific barriers to employment in a sample of participant enrolled in a therapeutic workplace intervention for substance abuse.
In study 1, we characterized and examined predictors of participant score on a staff-related scale of interpersonal skills. As predictors, we used three demographic variables: Education, sex, and age. We collected data on demographic variables from Addiction Severity Index-Lite – Clinical Factors, Clinical/Training Version. We conducted a Job Termination to determine duration since last job held and type of termination. We also created a Work Behavior Inventory(WBI) consisting of five subscale (Social Skill, Cooperativeness, Work Habits, Work Quality, Personal Presentation). Participant age, education, sex, time since last job held, and termination type were used as predictors of WBI scores. We calculated intercorrelations for WBI scale scores and found that Social Skill Scale was highly correlated with both Cooperativeness (r (77) = 0.85, p<0.001) and Personal Presentation (r (77) = 0.78, p<0.001), and that the Personal Presentation Scale was also highly correlated with Cooperativeness ( r(77) = 084, p<0.001). Based on these finding, we combined the scales into one average score that was used as criterion variables in a multiple linear regression analysis. The result indicated that participants in our sample did not consistently demonstrated high levels of professional interpersonal skills. Especially higher age was associated with lower scores on WBI, while education, sex, and time since last job were not related to WBI scores.
In Study 2, we examined whether participants had a lower level of computer knowledge than job seekers in general population, and investigated possible predictors of computer knowledge in the sample. Participants in Study 2 (N=29) were enrolled in the same therapeutic workplace. Demographic Variables were collected in the same manner as in Study 1. After then participants completed the Prove It! Version 4.0 Computer Literacy-Basic Test. The test consists of 34 multiple choices and true-false questions and covers five subject areas: hardware, Internet, safety, software, and Microsoft Windows operating system. In order to determine if scores of Study 2 participants differed from test score of community applicants, we compared the mean score of participants with the test’s mean score using one-sample t-test ( test value = 27.

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