CEPAR and the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing hosted a public lecture by Dr Morten Wahrendorf, University Dusseldorf.
Abstract:
There is increasing recognition that health and wellbeing in older age is influenced by conditions at earlier stages of the life course. However, few studies enable us to address life course influence in detail. In this presentation we use life history data collected retrospectively among older men and women in Europe, and illustrate the value and the opportunities the data offers for greater understanding of health and wellbeing in later life.
Specifically we study the links between work and employment conditions, and health in later life, using data collected in two European studies on ageing across 14 countries: the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing (ELSA), and the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The work and employment conditions of respondents are measured in terms of specific characteristics of their working careers, e.g. stressful work or episodes of unemployment.
We also make use of sequence analysis to summarise entire careers into specific types of employment history, e.g. fragmented histories vs continuous employment. Our results illustrate clear differences in employment histories between men and women, and between the countries studied. Furthermore, we find consistent associations between stressful conditions and/or types of employment histories on health in later life, particularly in cases of unstable and fragmented working careers for men. This highlights the importance of continuous employment for health and well-being in later life, and on the need for refined and comprehensive measures of life course circumstances if we are to shed more light on the development of health and wellbeing in later life.
Morten Wahrendorf is a senior researcher at the Centre for Health and Society, University Dusseldorf, Germany. He is a sociologist with substantial expertise in research methodology and statistics. His main research areas are work stress, health inequalities, life course epidemiology, data visualization, comparative welfare research and ageing