Early Career Researcher Seminar Series - The Health Effects of Occupational Meaningfulness: Evidence from the UK Furlough Scheme

The Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies is delighted to welcome you to our Early Career Researcher (ECR) Seminar Series - an initiative designed to inform, inspire, and support researchers in the early stages of their academic and professional journeys.

This series brings together a diverse range of speakers, including experienced academics, professional service experts, and fellow ECRs, to share practical advice, career insights, and personal experiences. Through these sessions, we aim to explore key aspects of research careers - from publishing and funding to networking, collaboration, and career development both within and beyond academia.

Whether you are pursuing your first commercial research opportunity or looking to build your academic profile, these seminars are here to provide you with knowledge, guidance, and a supportive community of peers.

We look forward to your participation and hope this series will be a valuable resource as you navigate the exciting and sometimes challenging early stages of your research career.

We are pleased to announce that our first guest speaker in the Early Career Researcher Seminar Series, will be Rachel Forshaw, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences and one of the poster prize winners at our ECR Conference earlier this year.

Her talk, entitled 'The Health Effects of Occupational Meaningfulness: Evidence from the UK Furlough Scheme' , promises to offer valuable insights relevant to early career researchers across disciplines.

Rachel examines whether the perceived meaningfulness of an occupation, as measured by its average perceived contribution to society, shapes the health and absence effects following temporary work suspension. Using UK panel data from the Covid-19 pandemic, she implements a triple-difference strategy that exploits variation in furlough status and occupational meaning. Under the
UK furlough scheme, workers remained formally employed but were temporarily inactive with publicly funded wage support. Rachel finds that workers in low-meaning occupations report worse general health on average than those in high-meaning roles. Following furlough, low-meaning workers experienced modest but significant improvements in self-reported general health and reductions in reported work absence. By contrast, furlough led to small health declines and increased absence among high-meaning workers. Estimated effects were modest and temporary, with no significant differences observed in functional physical or mental health measures. These findings contribute new causal evidence that occupational meaning plays a small but meaningful role for health and work absence following periods of employment disruption.

These sessions will run from 1pm to 2pm in EMG80 (Health and Care Collaborative Space, Hybrid option available)

Tea/coffee and biscuits will be served on arrival.