The psychological harm caused by unemployment is one of the most robust findings in wellbeing research. Unemployment is one of the few life events that individuals do not fully adapt to and, even after new work is found, individuals can be left permanently scarred with wellbeing settling at lower levels than that of those who have never been unemployed. Much research has been conducted across multiple disciplines to explore the mechanisms underpinning these findings, but the underlying causes are still not fully understood. One specific aspect of the experience of unemployment where very little quantitative research has been conducted is how those who are unemployed experience time. While information on how people organise and use their time is available, historically no major panel survey has gathered information on how people perceive, or experience, their time.

With this in mind, we included five questions concerning passage of time judgements in Wave 16 of the UK Understanding Society Innovation Panel so that we could explore if, and how, one aspect of time perception – passage of time judgements – varied by employment status and, if it did, whether such differences mediated levels of reported life satisfaction and general mental health. Our research indicates that the passage of time judgements of the unemployed may be materially different to those in full-time employment, with time feeling like it is passing far more slowly, both in the moment, and when periods of time in the past are considered retrospectively. Moreover, our analysis suggests that these different time perceptions may partly help to explain the differences in levels of life satisfaction that are typically found between these two groups in the wellbeing literature.

Co-authors

Professor Liam Delany, London School of Economics