While the transition from education to work is challenging for young professionals, navigating new roles, norms, and tasks may be even more difficult for those with ADHD. Professional norms and values (e.g., punctuality, high performance) might conflict with ADHD-related behaviours and difficulties, further complicating this transition and potentially reinforcing masking or suppressing ADHD symptoms and behaviours at work (i.e., camouflaging).
Early research proposes that ADHD camouflaging is associated with poorer mental health outcomes, suggesting it may be a potential mechanism underlying the worse work-related outcomes often seen in ADHD (e.g., lower labour market participation). At the same time, autism research indicates that camouflaging can also be associated with benefits, such as career advancement. Thus, understanding which factors determine camouflaging and how it relates to health and work outcomes is a crucial first step towards maximising positive and minimising adverse work- and health-related outcomes in ADHD.
This project aims to examine the relationships among work characteristics, daily camouflage, and fatigue, as well as long-term health and work outcomes, such as burnout, well-being, and performance.
Given that a good conceptualisation and measurement are crucial prerequisites for researching a phenomenon or behaviour, this project also entails qualitative research to derive a conceptualisation of ADHD camouflaging and develop two measurement instruments: the ADHD Camouflaging Scale and the Camouflaging Motivation Scale.