Employment Following Spinal Cord Injury: A Covariance Structure Analysis

Two structural models of employment status following spinal cord injury were tested with survey responses from 120 former patients of the main rehabilitation center in British Columbia, Canada. The "direct effect" model used in previous research provided a very poor representation of the data. The model proposed in this study provided a better fit, but also fell short of the minimum acceptable goodness-of-fit standards. Educational attainment, motivation to work, social support, and driving one's own car had significant direct paths to employment status. Educational attainment and lesion level were linked to motivation to work. Age at injury directly predicted educational attainment. The hypothesized link between locus of control and motivation to work was rejected, and subsequent investigation raised questions about its direction of causality with other variables in the model. A revised model for future research is presented and the implications of these findings and methodology are discussed.