Vocational Status as a Moderator of Substance Abusers' Employability

Abstract

In response to a congressional mandate, the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the Training and Employment Program (TEP) research study to evaluate a vocational program for methadone treatment clients. As part of the TEP study, the researchers developed the Vocational Readiness Screener (VRS), which was administered to 184 treatment clients participating in that study. This study used a structural equation modeling approach to evaluate the employability framework on which the VRS was based by testing the hypotheses that employability is comprised of multiple underlying factors and that vocational status moderates employability. The empirical evidence that supported the study hypotheses included estimates of test-retest and composite reliability, estimates of factor validity, and group differences in the covariance and inter-factor correlation matrices for the job-ready and non job-ready groups. The results showed differences in the factor loadings and in the structure of each of the latent factors in the employability model, which appear to be aligned with stages of vocational readiness. From a methodological perspective, these findings represent an analytic shift from prediction to latent variable analysis and allow for a better understanding of the moderator effects of vocational status at progressive stages in the rehabilitation process. Treatment implications for the substance abuse and vocational rehabilitation fields are also discussed.