https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00417-2
Regular Article
Mental health concerns precede quits: shifts in the work discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic and great resignation
1
Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria
2
Growth Lab, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
3
LMU Munich School of Management, Munich, Germany
4
Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science, Limerick, Ireland
5
Department of Mathematics and Statistics (MACSI), University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
6
The Psychometrics Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
7
Department of Sociology, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany
Received:
16
February
2023
Accepted:
25
August
2023
Published online:
12
October
2023
To study the causes of the 2021 Great Resignation, we use text analysis and investigate the changes in work- and quit-related posts between 2018 and 2021 on Reddit. We find that the Reddit discourse evolution resembles the dynamics of the U.S. quit and layoff rates. Furthermore, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, conversations related to working from home, switching jobs, work-related distress, and mental health increased, while discussions on commuting or moving for a job decreased. We distinguish between general work-related and specific quit-related discourse changes using a difference-in-differences method. Our main finding is that mental health and work-related distress topics disproportionally increased among quit-related posts since the onset of the pandemic, likely contributing to the quits of the Great Resignation. Along with better labor market conditions, some relief came beginning-to-mid-2021 when these concerns decreased. Our study underscores the importance of having access to data from online forums, such as Reddit, to study emerging economic phenomena in real time, providing a valuable supplement to traditional labor market surveys and administrative data.
Key words: Mental health / Quit / Great Resignation / Topic modelling / Labor market / COVID-19
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00417-2.
R. Maria del Rio-Chanona and Alejandro Hermida-Carrillo contributed equally to this work.
© The Author(s) 2023
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