Andrea Bazzoli (he/his) is a PhD candidate in the department of psychology. Bazzoli’s area of expertise is occupational health psychology (a branch of organizational psychology). He is a member of the Coalition for Healthy and Equitable Workplaces Lab led by Tahira Probst at WSU Vancouver. Everything they do in the lab is a team effort and working with his team is what Bazzoli enjoys the most about research.

Since 2020, Bazzoli’s research has followed three paths: first, exploration of the nature of economic stressors (e.g., job insecurity and financial stress), their explanatory mechanisms, novel consequences, and individual and contextual moderators; second, the investigation of predictors and correlation of proactive safety behaviors in the workplace, including safety voice and accident underreporting; and third, examination of how advancements in quantitative methodology can be best used to advance empirical and substantive work in organizational psychology.

Bazzoli’s research is getting noticed. Bazzoli was lead author on a 2022 study published in the journal “International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health” that was one of the top WSU news stories in 2022. The study looked at how workers in the United States are affected by precarity – a persistent insecurity in employment or income. They collected data from 315 employees across 45 states and DC and assessed a range of measures related to precarity such as job insecurity, financial insecurity, prior unemployment, household income and underemployment. They found that employees fit into only two categories; those that were doing well and those that were doing really poorly. This was an unexpected finding; the authors expected some people to fit in-between the “haves and the have-nots.” Particularly concerning is that as we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, some workers are being left further and further behind widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. About 25% of the workers surveyed fell into the have-not category.

The have-nots also tended to have worse outcomes across work, health and life domains. Bazzoli’s work suggests that as organizations shift their workforce towards more precarious forms of employment (gig workers or independent contractors, for example), the workforce may become less healthy, less productive, less innovative and less committed. This will spell trouble for employers as well as society in general.  The implication of Bazzoli’s work is clear; finding ways for workers to leave precarity is necessary for a healthy and productive society.  

Bazzoli was born in Italy and lived there until he was 21 years old. He then moved to the U.S. and earned his bachelor’s degree at Drury University. Afterwards, he moved back to Italy, then to the UK, where he earned his first master’s degree. He earned a second master’s degree at WSU Vancouver in 2021. He plans to defend his PhD dissertation in Spring 2023 and will be joining the Department of Psychology at Baruch College (City University of New York) as a tenure-track assistant professor in Fall 2023.