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Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)

Informal caregiving, defined as unpaid care provided to a relative or friend with some sort of special need, is a topic of research across different disciplines. Previous research highlights the prevalence and heterogeneity of caregivers in terms of their age, gender, relationship with the care reci...

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Autores principales: Larkina, Marina, Smith, Jacqui
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8681601/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.2919
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author Larkina, Marina
Smith, Jacqui
author_facet Larkina, Marina
Smith, Jacqui
author_sort Larkina, Marina
collection PubMed
description Informal caregiving, defined as unpaid care provided to a relative or friend with some sort of special need, is a topic of research across different disciplines. Previous research highlights the prevalence and heterogeneity of caregivers in terms of their age, gender, relationship with the care recipient, and the duration of care provision. However, most research focuses on a specific episode of caregiving. Little is known about the people who provide care to multiple recipients throughout their own life. To fill this gap, we examined data from the HRS Spring 2017 Life History Mail Survey (N = 3520; age range 50-101 yrs). Participants reported their relationship with people to whom they had provided unpaid care for ≥ 6 months (max 5) and listed the start and end years of care. Compared with people who had not provided care, caregivers (N = 1000, 28%) were more likely to be women, white, and currently widowed. They cared for their parents (67%), spouses (22%), children (11%), or other relatives (16%) and 30% reported providing care two or more times (M = 1.44, SD = 0.81). Respondents, who reported multiple episodes of caregiving were more likely to be women, widowed, aged between 25 and 50 at the time of first providing care. People who first cared for their spouse were less likely to report multiple caregiving episodes comparing with those who cared for parents or children. Future research will examine the health and well-being consequences associated with caregivers’ histories of providing unpaid care to others.
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spelling pubmed-86816012021-12-17 Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) Larkina, Marina Smith, Jacqui Innov Aging Abstracts Informal caregiving, defined as unpaid care provided to a relative or friend with some sort of special need, is a topic of research across different disciplines. Previous research highlights the prevalence and heterogeneity of caregivers in terms of their age, gender, relationship with the care recipient, and the duration of care provision. However, most research focuses on a specific episode of caregiving. Little is known about the people who provide care to multiple recipients throughout their own life. To fill this gap, we examined data from the HRS Spring 2017 Life History Mail Survey (N = 3520; age range 50-101 yrs). Participants reported their relationship with people to whom they had provided unpaid care for ≥ 6 months (max 5) and listed the start and end years of care. Compared with people who had not provided care, caregivers (N = 1000, 28%) were more likely to be women, white, and currently widowed. They cared for their parents (67%), spouses (22%), children (11%), or other relatives (16%) and 30% reported providing care two or more times (M = 1.44, SD = 0.81). Respondents, who reported multiple episodes of caregiving were more likely to be women, widowed, aged between 25 and 50 at the time of first providing care. People who first cared for their spouse were less likely to report multiple caregiving episodes comparing with those who cared for parents or children. Future research will examine the health and well-being consequences associated with caregivers’ histories of providing unpaid care to others. Oxford University Press 2021-12-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8681601/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.2919 Text en © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Abstracts
Larkina, Marina
Smith, Jacqui
Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
title Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
title_full Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
title_fullStr Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
title_full_unstemmed Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
title_short Caregiving Across the Life Course: Life History Findings from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
title_sort caregiving across the life course: life history findings from the health and retirement study (hrs)
topic Abstracts
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8681601/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.2919
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