Introduction

The ‘changing nature of work’ has received increasing levels of attention within lay and research communities. In addition to the technologies of work, scrutiny has been focused on major shifts in the relationship between workers and their ‘employer’—namely the general trend of employers externalising economic and legal risk onto workers, producing more precarious and insecure labour market experiences. Such concerns have led researchers to investigate potential adverse health implications of working within various forms of temporary employment, which is typically framed as an objective marker of job insecurity.

As with other areas of occupational health research, careful definition and ascertainment of the ‘exposure’ are paramount to the interpretation of such studies. However, employment arrangements research continues to suffer from a lack of definitional clarity, stemming from underdeveloped theory about how employment relationships affect worker health. More challenging, this line of research also differs from classical occupational health studies in that the social context of the work and workers is integral to formulating and interpreting analyses. In this way, employment arrangements research requires a multilevel approach.

The article by Hahn et al1 in this issue exemplifies the importance of these definitional and contextual aspects of epidemiological research on relational aspects of employment, such as casual employment in the Australian context addressed in their paper. In this commentary, we explore further aspects of exposure definition and the importance of context in the interpretation of findings, in relation to the work by Hahn et al.