Work-life imbalance: informal care and paid employment

In the United Kingdom informal carers are people who look after relatives or friends who need extra support because of age, physical or learning disability or illness. The majority of informal carers are women and female carers also care for longer hours and for longer durations than men. Thus women and older women in particular, shoulder the burden of informal care. We consider the costs of caring in terms of the impact that these kinds of caring responsibilities have on employment. The research is based on the responses of informal carers to a dedicated questionnaire and in-depth interviews with a smaller sub-sample of carers. Our results indicate that the duration of a caring episode as well as the hours carers commit to caring impact on their employment participation. In addition carers’ employment is affected by financial considerations, the needs of the person they care for, carers’ beliefs about the compatibility of informal care and paid work and employers’ willingness to accommodate carers’ needs. Overall, the research confirms that informal carers continue to face difficulties when they try to combine employment and care in spite of recent policy initiatives designed to help them

Multigenerational socioeconomic attainments and mortality among older men: An adjacent generations approach

Background: Recent work in stratification and demography argues for the importance of multiple familial generations in status attainment and other transmission processes. Health disparities research in this area generally assumes that the rewards of attainment are paid forward across generations, meaning grandparent and parent achievements give children a health advantage. However, an emerging literature suggests that mortality risk in old age may be more closely related to the attainments of parents and adult children. Objective: We develop a new approach to understanding family attainments and mortality in later life and test the multigenerational structure of health disparities suggested by the long arm, personal attainment, and social foreground perspectives. Methods: The analysis uses nearly complete mortality data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men, a representative sample of US men aged 45 to 59 in 1966. Results: We find that older men with parents who farmed had a median age of death that was 1.3 years higher than those who had parents with manual occupations, and men with adult children who had 16 or more years of schooling had a median age of death almost 2 years higher than those with children with 12 or fewer years of schooling. Conclusions: We find evidence of a three-generation model in which parent occupation, personal wealth, and adult child attainments are independently associated with older men's mortality. Contribution: These findings highlight the relevance of adjacent generations for health and mortality in later life and the importance of historical context for accurately measuring socioeconomic attainments in different generations and cohorts