Worker-Led Research Yields a New Framework for Assessing Job Quality

This report documents the first phase of a worker-centered, participatory research pilot that uses more than wages and benefits to evaluate job quality.

To build a research team that could meet their immediate objectives and fulfills the work’s broader vision, the researchers hired four Worker-Researchers (WRs). All had experience in what they described as low-wage jobs, contract work, or both. Once trained, the WRs led an iterative research process, developing research questions, an interview guide, and a selection framework for participants. Existing research on quality jobs and discussions of personal experiences among team members informed this initial work.

That process yielded the following research questions:

• What are quality jobs and better employment models from the workers’ perspective?
• What kinds of opportunities, training, or support have workers found valuable?
• How do workers define an ideal work situation and overall career?

From July to September 2020, the WRs used these questions to conduct 46 in-depth, one-on-one interviews via videoconference with the research participants. The team made three significant shifts in the research process that yielded key insights for the final quality jobs framework:

• WR-Led Shift 1: Exploring the Concept of “Ownership.” The first critical shift the WRs made came from reviewing pilot interviews and the conversations about power, decision-making, and what it means to have ownership in your work.
• WR-Led Shift 2: Opening up the Definition of a “Career.” The second critical shift the WRs made emerged while revising the interview guide. They saw a need to re-examine the language used to describe work experience.
• WR-Led Shift 3: Incorporating the Experience of “Being Policed.” The third critical shift emerged while the WRs were trying to describe and explain the differences between the initial interview data and the information they gathered in their additional feedback sessions.

As a result of the WR-led design, shifts in approach, and unique findings, the researchers effectively integrated the three dimensions from the outset of the study—worker power, job quality, and career development—into a single framework from the workers’ perspective. Specifically, they created a four-quadrant matrix representing the concepts of ownership and autonomy to facilitate their analysis and discussion.

(This report is 18 pages long.)

Phase 1 of the researchers’ multiphase, collective work yielded insights into their original research questions and what it takes to conduct truly inclusive participatory research. These insights came primarily from lessons learned through the leadership of the WRs and from their interviewees. Their involvement made possible this tangible, emerging framework for evaluating quality employment that uses the concepts of ownership and autonomy as guideposts.

The Job Quality Framework created by the researchers includes a four-quadrant matrix. The matrix was built upon two axes: A vertical axis representing the continuum of feelings of ownership and a horizontal axis representing the continuum of feelings of autonomy. To ensure that the framework was clear and consistent, they further defined each axis by labeling it with a set of criteria. In doing so, three main categories of work experiences emerged:

1. Trapped and Struggling: Defined by lacking options.
2. Flexible but Stuck: Some degree of autonomy and ownership at work but end up being stuck.
3. Happily Invested: A pathway to “real” economic ownership and “real” autonomy to define and create their career.

In Phase 2, they plan to set up an investment fund with built-in worker oversight with the mission to provide financing for employers working on designing better employment models. Now that workers have designed, tested, and validated the worker-led research approach, it must be tested and validated by employers, business leaders, and other groups with the power to affect real change in both private and public systems and individual jobs. All involved entities must work together to make this framework actionable, co-design what it looks like to have ownership and autonomy at work, and lay out concrete steps for companies to achieve the goal of creating quality jobs for their employees.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2021
• Author(s): Dow, M.; Schmitt, A.; Bediako, S.; Bursey, L.; Guerra Garcia, E.; Pendergrass, L.; Shaw, M.
• Funding Source: James Irvine Foundation
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Justin Venneri
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies