Preference for Competitive Employment in People with Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Proportions

The inclusion of people with mental disorders (MD) into competitive employment has become an important political and therapeutic goal. The present paper investigates meta-analytically to which extent people with MD who were unemployed or on sick leave due to MD prefer to work in a competitive job environment. For this systematic review and meta-analysis of proportions, we searched Medline, PsycInfo, Cinahl, Google Scholar, and reference lists for peer-reviewed publications from 1990 to Dec 2023, which provided data on the job preferences of people with MD. Two authors independently conducted full-text screening and quality assessments. Pooled proportions of job preferences were calculated with a random-effects meta-analysis of single proportions, and subgroup analyses were performed to examine characteristics associated with job preferences. We included 30 studies with a total of 11,029 participants in the meta-analysis. The overall proportion of participants who expressed a preference for competitive employment was 0.61 (95 https://osf.io/7dj9r