# Effects of Job Quality in the Service Sector on Health-Related Outcomes Across the Life Course

> **NIH NIH R01** · HARVARD UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $714,788

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
The U.S. service sector employs 27 million workers, 20% of the U.S. workforce. Abetted by new technologies,
employers in the service sector have embraced surveillance and sanctioning, which affect time and pace of tasks
on the job, unpredictable and constrained scheduling practices, which affect the organization of time on and off
work, and automation, which shapes longer-term expectations for the future and job insecurity. We refer to these
working conditions, collectively, as temporal dimensions of job quality to draw a contrast with purely economic
dimensions of job quality. Although prior research has established a robust relationship between other aspects
of job conditions and health, there is a gap in knowledge about how these new and increasingly prevalent
workplace practices affect worker health and healthy aging. One important reason for this gap is a lack of suitable
existing data containing information on both these emergent workplace practices and workers’ health outcomes,
yet policy makers have already begun to take action to regulate these practices. There is thus a critical need to
collect new data that will allow researchers to estimate the health effects of exposure to these temporal
dimensions of job quality for workers across the life course. The proposed research expands upon an innovative
method for collecting survey data at scale, at low-cost, and with speed from a target population of service-sector
workers. We use the Facebook advertising platform to purchase and place survey recruitment advertisements
in the mobile and desktop newsfeeds of Facebook and Instagram users, targeting those who work in retail and
fast food. This approach allows us to target users with particular employers and/or in specific localities. We
propose to collect repeated cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data from 90,000 workers across the country.
The proposed research uses these data and methods to accomplish three aims. First, we estimate the
relationship between emergent temporal dimensions of job quality and worker health and healthy aging. The
data collection is designed to capitalize on natural experiments to provide rigorous evidence on the health effects
of temporally precarious work. One set of analyses will exploit city and company policy changes to use rigorous
difference-in-differences and instrumental variable methods to estimate causal effects of job quality on health.
Second, we assess whether the health consequences of surveillance and sanctioning, schedule unpredictability
and constraint, and automation vary across the life course. Finally, we will assess the social and public supports
that may buffer and mitigate the harmful health effects of these temporal dimensions of job quality. In sum, we
deploy an innovative data collection approach combined with rigorous estimation to take advantage of natural
experiments implemented when labor laws or company practices change. The significant contributions o...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10122775
- **Project number:** 1R01AG066898-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** HARVARD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** KRISTEN HARKNETT
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $714,788
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-04-15 → 2025-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10122775

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10122775, Effects of Job Quality in the Service Sector on Health-Related Outcomes Across the Life Course (1R01AG066898-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10122775. Licensed CC0.

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