The present study is an investigation of the effects of perceived overqualification on dimensions of job satisfaction. The data for this study came from a two-wave panel study of members of a midwestern American Postal Workers Union local. Job satisfaction was operationalized with 4 subscales from the Job Descriptive Index (P. Smith, L. Kendall, & C. Hulin, 1969). The following three hypotheses were tested: (a) Perceived overqualification will be negatively related to facets of job satisfaction; (b) there is stability in the test-retest correlations of facets of job satisfaction; and (c) the effects of perceived overqualification on facets of job satisfaction will not change from Time 1 to Time 2 because of adaptation. The cross-sectional results supported the hypotheses and suggested that perceived overqualification has a negative effect on job satisfaction. However, the relationships varied by dimension of perceived overqualification and dimension of job satisfaction. Future researchers of overqualification and dimensions of job satisfaction should consider relative deprivation as a source of work-related deprivations.

The relationship between perceived overqualification and psychological well-being was explored within the framework of stress-illness models, using multiple regression analysis. Data were collected from 179 male and 109 female members of a local midwestern chapter of the American Postal Workers Union. As expected, there was a significant, positive relationship between perceived overqualification and psychological well-being: The greater the perceived overqualification, the greater the psychological distress. The interaction between perceived overqualification and gender was not significant.

The authors extended and evaluated the dimensionality of the L. J. Khan and P. C. Morrow (1991) subjective underemployment scale. They used data from 3 independent samples to assess the measurement properties of the scale. The results of confirmatory factor analyses supported 2 dimensions and indicated that the measurement model parameters partially generalized across samples. Correlational and additional confirmatory factor analytic results rendered empirical support for most of the postulated relationships of the 2 overqualification dimensions with the somatization, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment variables. The findings indicate that the scale of perceived overqualification needs to be further developed and validated in different samples. The implications of the findings for person-job fit are discussed.

In the present study, we examined the effects of perceived overqualification on health and the moderating effect of emotional support. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses found 2 indicators of perceived overqualification: “mismatch” and “no‐grow.” Perceived mismatch had a significant negative effect on health but perceived no‐grow did not. The main effect revealed that the greater the perceived emotional support, the greater the health. The significant interaction of perceived emotional support and mismatch, and perceived emotional support and no‐grow on health indicates that the negative effects of overqualification on health was greater for those perceiving low emotional support than for those perceiving high emotional support. The significance of social support in illuminating the relationship between perceived overqualification and health are discussed.

In the juvenile justice literature, deep-end interventions such as commitment to a confinement facility are reserved for the most severe delinquents but unfortunately have been shown to have negative consequences. The current study repurposes juvenile confinement within a criminal career context to empirically examine its role in homicide offending based on data from a sample of 445 male, adult habitual criminals. Poisson regression models indicated that juvenile confinementmeasured both dimensionally and categorically-predicted murder arrests despite controls for juvenile homicide offending, juvenile violent delinquency, juvenile felony adjudications, juvenile noncompliance violations, juvenile arrest charges, onset, age, three racial/ethnic classifications, career arrests, career violent index arrests, and career property index arrests. Receiver operating characteristics-area under the curve (ROC-AUC) graphs showed that juvenile confinement predicted murder significantly but modestly better than chance although career violent offending was the strongest predictor of murder perpetration.