Exploration of the social identity processes in employed students

Term-time employed students are a growing, yet underrepresented group of higher education students in the UK. Nonetheless, while previous literature has focussed on the practical ramifications of combining employment and study for university students, we explored whether there are additional sources of normative mismatch that plague the experiences of employed students. By drawing on the Social Identity Approach and the Identity Incompatibility framework, in two qualitative studies we found that employed students do experience both practical and identity incompatibility (Chapter 2), and that the experiences of employed students force them to perceive salient intergroup categorisations between themselves, their work colleagues and non-employed students (Chapter 3). Adopting the employed student identity also acted as an inoculating force against negative intergroup comparisons. In Chapter 4, we used multilevel modelling to explore whether certain aspects of the employed student experience become more central or important to the employed student identity if they practically or symbolically differentiated employed students from non-employed students, and the potential antecedents and correlates of this identity. We found that practically differentiating aspects were positively associated with their centrality and importance to the employed student identity, and that the employed student identity was positively associated with students’ status in society. In Chapter 5, we explored whether social, academic, and economic factors related to part-time employment at university were associated with sixth-form and college students’ university choices. We found that two factors –anticipated academic struggles with a job at university and the perceived percentage of employed students at high-status universities – were associated with students’ university choices, however an experimental manipulation revealed that the perceived percentage of employed students at high-status universities did not increase students’ willingness to apply to a fictitious university. In Chapter 6, we discuss the practical and future research implications of our work for practitioners, researchers, and universities.