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Reconciliation of elderly care and paid work

The research on conciliation of paid work and family is mainly concerned about how parents and in particular mothers are able to balance child rearing, labour market participation and career prospects. Much less attention has been paid to the second caring phase in the life course, at the time parents or relatives become frail and need somebody to care for.

Population and labour force projections indicate that the issue of having caring responsibilities toward elderly people and being employed will have a growing incidence in the future because of a higher paid work orientation of potential care givers (women), changing rules with regard to pension age and higher care demands due to population ageing (see the recent report on Long-term care in the European Union, 2008).

The project aims to inquire in a comparative perspective:

  1. The incidence of care giving towards elderly people in the population of working age and more specifically in the active population.
  2. What impact care giving has on the employment career of carers in different national contexts?

Using a micro-macro perspective, we will therefore explore how different elderly care and employment regimes interact with each other in shaping the choices of individuals having frail family members in their kin network. Symmetrically, we will explore how care preferences influence job/care arrangements.

State of the art report:

How Caring for an Adult Person Affects Employment? (Hessel, P. and W. Keck) download