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

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.