Job Insecurity Within Higher Education: An Assessment of Measurement Invariance and Global Trends
摘要
The current international collaboration on investigating job insecurity within higher education offers unique opportunities for comparative investigations across nations and cultures. Yet, to do so first requires that survey respondents in each country interpreted the job insecurity construct in a conceptually equivalent manner. Therefore, the purpose of our chapter was to empirically evaluate the measurement invariance of the Quantitative Job Insecurity scale and the Qualitative Job Insecurity scale used across the ten country samples. Increasingly strict levels of equivalence were tested: configural, metric, and scalar invariance. Results from the multigroup confirmatory factor analyses provide support for metric invariance of both job insecurity scales across ten countries. Although strong evidence of scalar invariance (allowing for cross-country comparisons of job insecurity) was not found, we performed additional alignment analyses to enable some cross-country comparisons to identify global trends regarding job insecurity. Among these, we found that the UK ranked the highest in both quantitative and qualitative aspects of job insecurity, whereas Romania ranked the lowest on both dimensions (i.e., had the most security). Interestingly, whereas most countries were fairly consistent in terms of their country-level rankings on both dimensions, Greece ranked among the lowest in quantitative job insecurity (implying relatively few fears of potential job loss), but ranked among the highest in qualitative job insecurity (indicating worries of future job quality changes).