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The results suggest that approximately one-third of women and one-fourth of men belong to trajectories, or latent classes, characterized by chronic moderate levels of underemployment over the adult life course. In addition, various trajectories revealed the multifarious nature of stress by demonstrating unique patterns of severity, duration, timing, and sequencing of underemployment. Findings confirmed past positive associations between underemployment and being African American or having lower education levels. And, of principal interest in this dissertation, results demonstrated that membership in worse underemployment trajectories was generally associated with higher levels of depression and worse self-rated health, but not binge drinking or chronic conditions at mid-adulthood for women and men.

Furthermore, the results suggest that a cumulative process is at play whereby adverse childhood conditions, including lower parental education and several measures of family and other disadvantages, operate by impeding educational attainment and/or increasing the odds of membership in a higher-risk underemployment tra jectory, which ultimately harms health. There is also evidence that those who have higher levels of baseline depression are disproportionately selected into worse underemployment trajectories.

Ultimately, these findings indicate that the underemployed must be disaggregated from the employed in future research, whether employment status is the focus of interest or a control variable. They also highlight the need to theoretically and methodologically engage the dynamic nature of stress, as well as situate stress in a life course framework whereby heterogeneous pathways over the life course originating in childhood are examined.