Q&A with Maris Vainre: Job Satisfaction and the Power of Preprints

What happens when researchers make their findings openly available before the traditional peer-review and publication process? For Maris Vainre, PhD, and her co-authors, sharing their study as a preprint led to media attention from outlets like New Scientist, generated over 1,800 downloads in several months, and sparked invitations to share their findings with audiences in and beyond academia.

A Research Fellow at the University of Tartu's Institute of Psychology in Estonia, Vainre focuses on wellbeing research, public health, and behavioral science—with particular emphasis on how to support mental health. Her recent work takes up a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between occupation and life satisfaction.

In their study, "How satisfaction varies among 263 occupations", Vainre and co-authors Kätlin Anni, Uku Vainik, and René Mõttus tackle a question that many of us have likely wondered about: are people in certain professions more or less satisfied with their jobs and lives than others?

By sharing their work as a preprint on PsyArXiv—a psychology preprint server hosted on the Open Science Framework (OSF)—while it undergoes peer review, Vainre and her colleagues made their findings immediately accessible to researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and others who might otherwise wait a year or more to access it, or lack access entirely due to paywalls.

In this Q&A, Vainre discusses what inspired the study, how preprints accelerate both scientific progress and real-world impact, and why she believes there's "little to lose and a lot to gain" from sharing research early and openly.

Q: Can you describe your study and what inspired you to explore this topic?

Since my PhD studies at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBU) at the University of Cambridge, I’ve been fascinated by how the workplace influences our wellbeing, and what responsibilities employers might have in supporting it. Many of us spend a large part of our lives working—not just in terms of time, but also mental capacity. In some workplaces, the culture is so strong that colleagues are referred to as “family.” Work can feel all-encompassing.

In our recent study at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Psychology, my colleagues and I explored whether life and job satisfaction differ across occupations. During my PhD studies, I often heard comments like, “You should study veterinarians/teachers/janitors—we’re one of the unhappiest groups.” That got me wondering: is there any truth to the idea that people in some professions are systematically less satisfied than others?

Surprisingly, this question hasn’t been studied in much detail. Previous research tended to group people broadly—like comparing managers to non-managers, or blue-collar to white-collar workers. We had access to a large dataset. This allowed us to dig deeper and compare the satisfaction across 263 different jobs.

Importantly, we were able to control for key factors that are known to influence life satisfaction: age, gender, education, income—and crucially, personality traits. Personality accounts for about 80% of the variation in life satisfaction and can also influence career choices. Including personality in our analysis was a novel step; earlier studies hadn’t done this, except for one study which had broad categories of job roles.

After accounting for all these variables, we found that job role explained about 2% of the variation in life satisfaction and 6% in job satisfaction. These figures might seem small, but they’re actually larger than the effects of major life events like getting married, having a child, or getting divorced.

Q: What motivated you to share your work as a preprint on PsyArXiv?

Sharing preprints has become a routine part of my research workflow, as I see two main benefits to doing so.

First, the formal publication process can be slow—often taking a year or more in my field. During that time, other researchers might be planning similar studies. By publishing a preprint, we make our work visible early, giving others a chance to build on it, replicate it, or refine it. This helps science progress more efficiently than if similar studies were conducted in isolation and only connected further down the line.

Second, there’s the issue of accessibility. When I was at Cambridge, the university had strong negotiating power with publishers, ensuring that publicly funded research was freely available to the public. But at the University of Tartu, we have fewer resources and less leverage. Open access fees can be prohibitively expensive. Preprints offer a way to make our work freely available to researchers and institutions that might have limited access to subscription-based journals.

In short, preprints help speed up scientific progress and make research more accessible—both of which are important to me.

Q: Have you noticed any impact—such as visibility, feedback, or collaboration opportunities—since posting this preprint?

To my surprise, yes. We've had two journal rejections—one citing general disagreement with our lab’s research direction—and the preprint could have helped clarify authorship and context.

More importantly, the preprint has sparked strong interest in the national and international media. For example, New Scientist contacted us soon after we published the preprint. We've also been invited to present at events aimed at both academic and non-academic audiences.

This kind of attention confirms the relevance of our work and keeps us motivated through the publication process.

Q: What do you see as the main benefits and challenges of using preprints in your field?

Preprints offer two major benefits: they make research accessible early and help others build on or replicate our work while it’s still under review. They accelerate scientific progress. They also support transparency, especially when paired with open data, code, and preregistration.

The only challenge I’ve come across is that some academic journals’ systems haven’t fully adapted to open science practices. In one case, a reviewer found our preprint online and felt the blind review was compromised, prompting the journal to ask us to remove the preprint. But preprints can’t simply be unpublished, and with open materials and preregistrations available, anonymity is often unrealistic.

Overall, preprints promote openness and visibility, but they also highlight the need for academic journals to rethink their review processes to match the best research practices.

Q: Do you have advice for other researchers who are considering sharing their work as a preprint?

There’s little to lose and a lot to gain. Preprints make research findings available to a wider audience—including practitioners and policymakers who often don’t have access to paywalled journals but do have the interest and expertise to engage with the work. Having a freely available preprint can help findings reach real-world application faster. To support accurate interpretation, it’s important to clearly discuss results’ implications and limitations.