This study investigates how continued work participation shapes cognitive functioning in later adulthood, highlighting the timing, duration, and reciprocal nature of these causal processes within a life course framework. Drawing on data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative longitudinal survey of U.S. adults aged 50 and older, we employ advanced causal estimation methods—including marginal structural models, structural nested models, and a Bayesian model comparison algorithm—to disentangle the causal pathways between work engagement and cognitive outcomes while adjusting for time-varying confounders. We measure cognitive functioning with a 27-point scale capturing memory, working memory, and processing speed, and categorize work participation as not employed, part-time, full-time, or fully retired. Preliminary findings indicate that continued work participation exerts positive effects on cognitive functioning after accounting for dynamic confounders, with these protective effects becoming more pronounced at older ages, especially for individuals in non-managerial or non-professional jobs. We also observe reciprocity, as higher cognitive functioning increases the likelihood of remaining employed. By modeling time-varying confounders and comparing multiple model specifications, we capture both overall and subgroup-specific effects, illustrating how work participation in one’s 50s may influence cognitive status well into the 70s. Moving forward, we will employ a Bayesian model comparison algorithm to identify the best-fitting models across different measures of timing and duration of work participation, capturing these complex longitudinal causal dynamics. These results have important implications for public policy and organizational practices, particularly as aging societies face extended working lives and rising concerns about cognitive decline.

Working remotely at least some of the time has long been seen as promoting a better integration of work and care obligations, even though prepandemic research is mixed as to the extent to which parents benefit emotionally from remote work. We exploit dual social experiments in schooling and work spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic to understand any stress-reducing effects of working from home under different school-closing state policy contexts. The pandemic led to an unprecedented shift to (and subsequent away from) remote and hybrid work but also to the implementation of various containment policies, most notably school closures driving a shift to remote learning that were put into effect to different degrees across U.S. states. Drawing on parents’ data from a U.S. nationally representative panel survey of workers who spent at least some time working from home since the pandemic onset, we use mixed-effects models to examine whether and in what ways cross-state and over-time variations in school closure policies shape any stress-reducing impacts of remote/hybrid work. Results show that when schools were not mandated to close, remote/hybrid work largely reduces parents’—especially mothers’—stress. However, an opposite pattern emerges in the face of closing mandates. These patterns are especially pronounced among white mothers and are not observed among nonparents.

Increasingly popular post-COVID-19 4-day workweek trials challenge deeply embedded 5-day, 40-hour temporal policies and practices, fostering time-work strategies by employees in the face of reduced working hours. This qualitative study in a small business manufacturing customized products finds similar adaptive responses among both office and shop workers. We detect four prevailing time-work strategies: (1) (re) organizing tasks, (2) shifting (work) time, (3) scheduling communication, and a more deliberate form of time shifting, (4) blocking out (work and nonwork) time. These strategies appear to reflect an increasing sense of employee agency. We discuss possible issues around sustainability.

Objectives. To examine whether workplace interventions to increase workplace flexibility and supervisor support and decrease work-family conflict can reduce cardiometabolic risk. Methods. We randomly assigned employees from information technology (n = 555) and long-term care (n = 973) industries in the United States to the Work, Family and Health Network intervention or usual practice (we collected the data 2009-2013). We calculated a validated cardiometabolic risk score (CRS) based on resting blood pressure, HbA1c (glycated hemoglobin), HDL (high-density lipoprotein) and total cholesterol, height and weight (body mass index), and tobacco consumption. We compared changes in baseline CRS to 12-month follow-up. Results. There was no significant main effect on CRS associated with the intervention in either industry. However, significant interaction effects revealed that the intervention improved CRS at the 12-month follow-up among intervention participants in both industries with a higher baseline CRS. Age also moderated intervention effects: older employees had significantly larger reductions in CRS at 12 months than did younger employees. Conclusions. The intervention benefited employee health by reducing CRS equivalent to 5 to 10 years of age-related changes for those with a higher baseline CRS and for older employees. Trial Registration. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02050204. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(12):1322-1331. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307413).

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a massive turn to remote work, followed by subsequent shifts for many into hybrid or fully returning to the office. To understand the patterned dynamics of subjec...

As the COVID-19 pandemic underscores, disparities in stress exposure, vulnerability, and protective resources are often magnified in times of rapid change. I argue that Leonard Pearlin’s integratio...

This paper addresses the uneven employment effects on older Americans (aged 50–75) of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on monthly Current Population Survey data from January through December 2020, we...

More Americans aged 50-75 are living alone than ever before (about a third of adults over 60 live alone today–see Ausubel 2020; Esteve 2020), placing older adults at risk of social isolation, and especially so during COVID-19. Not only do demographers’ project the rate of older adults living alone will continue to rise, but they also predict increasing racial disparities due to differential population aging rates (Verdery and Margolis 2017). We pinpoint two mediators of social isolation: employment status and living arrangements, drawing on panel data from the Current Population Survey, from January 2018 through August 2021 (N = 83,232), to investigate whether the pandemic increased disparities in vulnerabilities to social isolation across different subgroups. We use an intersectional lens to consider the experiences of population groups defined by gender, age, race/ethnicity and social class. We know that employment has important protective health benefits (Berkman, et al. 2000; Kelly, et al. 2017). Living arrangements condition social isolation, especially in terms of living alone (Cudjoe, et al. 2020). The aim of our study is twofold. First, we aim to show how the dynamics of living alone and employment participation for older adults change between the immediate pre-Covid period and Covid period, using COVID-19 as a natural experiment in precipitating change. Second, we show how demographic characteristics intersect to structure vulnerability to social isolation during the same period. Our results demonstrate the risks of social isolation are not evenly distributed, suggesting the need for policies and practices promoting social inclusion.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed where paid work is done. Workers able to do so have been required to work remotely. We draw on survey data collected in October 2020 from a nationally represen...

The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic’s effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic’s implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic’s social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic’s short- and long-term consequences unfold.

<p>We theorize a stress proliferation process whereby the stress of job precarity translates into the stress of work-to-family conflict (WFC). We test whether this process differs by gender and household income. Using four cross-sectional waves of the General Social Survey ( N = 2,340), we find a positive association between job insecurity and WFC for women but not men. Examined by household income levels, the association is found only for respondents in the lowest income tercile. Furthermore, gender intersects with household income to shape the stress proliferation process. While the insecurity–WFC relationship holds for women across all household income levels, for men this relationship shifts from positive for men in the lowest income tercile to negative for men in the highest income tercile. Our findings suggest that entrenched gendered expectations around work and family may lead women (regardless of household income) and lower-class men to be most vulnerable to stress proliferation.</p>

Although calls for intervention designs are numerous within the organizational literature and increasing efforts are being made to conduct rigorous randomized controlled trials, existing studies have rarely evaluated the long-term sustainability of workplace health intervention outcomes, or mechanisms of this process. This is especially the case with regard to objective and subjective sleep outcomes. We hypothesized that a work-family intervention would increase both self-reported and objective actigraphic measures of sleep quantity and sleep quality at 6 and 18 months post-baseline in a sample of information technology workers from a U.S. Fortune 500 company. Significant intervention effects were found on objective actigraphic total sleep time and self-reported sleep insufficiency at the 6- and 18-month follow-up, with no significant decay occurring over time. However, no significant intervention effects were found for objective actigraphic wake after sleep onset or self-reported insomnia symptoms. A significant indirect effect was found for the effect of the intervention on objective actigraphic total sleep time through the proximal intervention target of 6-month control over work schedule and subsequent more distal 12-month family time adequacy. These results highlight the value of long-term occupational health intervention research, while also highlighting the utility of this work-family intervention with respect to some aspects of sleep. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The notion of constellations is central to many occupational health theories; empirical research is nevertheless dominated by variable-centered methodologies. Guided by the job demands-resources framework, we use a person-centered longitudinal approach to identify constellations of job demands and resources (task-based and time-based) over time that predict changes in well-being. We situate our research in two dissimilar, but growing, industries in the United States—information technology (IT) and long-term care. Drawing on data collected over 18 months, we identify five patterned, stable constellations of job demands/resources using group-based multi-trajectory modeling: (1) high strain/low hours, (2) high strain/low hours/shift work, (3) high strain/long hours, (4) active (high demands, high control) and (5) lower strain (lower demands, high control). IT workers are overrepresented in the lower-strain and active constellations, whereas long-term care providers are more often in high-strain constellations. Workers in the lower-strain constellation experience increased job satisfaction and decreased emotional exhaustion, work-family conflict and psychological distress over 18 months. In comparison, workers in high-strain job constellations fare worse on these outcomes, as do those in the active constellation. Industrial contexts matter, however: Compared with long-term care workers, IT workers' well-being is more at risk when working in the “high strain/long hours” constellation. As the labor market continues to experience structural changes, scholars and policy makers need to attend to redesigning the ecological contexts of work conditions to promote workers' well-being while taking into account industrial differences.

OBJECTIVES: Women who combine formal and informal caregiving roles represent a unique, understudied population. In the literature, healthcare employees who simultaneously provide unpaid elder care at home have been referred to as double-duty caregivers. The present study broadens this perspective by examining the psychosocial implications of double-duty child care (child care only), double-duty elder care (elder care only), and triple-duty care (both child care and elder care or "sandwiched" care). METHOD: Drawing from the Work, Family, and Health Study, we focus on a large sample of women working in nursing homes in the United States (n = 1,399). We use multiple regression analysis and analysis of covariance tests to examine a range of psychosocial implications associated with double- and triple-duty care. RESULTS: Compared with nonfamily caregivers, double-duty child caregivers indicated greater family-to-work conflict and poorer partner relationship quality. Double-duty elder caregivers reported more family-to-work conflict, perceived stress, and psychological distress, whereas triple-duty caregivers indicated poorer psychosocial functioning overall. DISCUSSION: Relative to their counterparts without family caregiving roles, women with combined caregiving roles reported poorer psychosocial well-being. Additional research on women with combined caregiving roles, especially triple-duty caregivers, should be a priority amidst an aging population, older workforce, and growing number of working caregivers.