The long-term mortality impact of combined job strain and family circumstances: A life course analysis of working American mothers

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Soc Sci Med
• Personal Author:
  Sabbath, Erika L. ; Mejía-Guevara, Iván ; Noelke, Clemens ; Berkman, Lisa F.
• Description:
  Background
  
  Work stress and family composition have been separately linked to later-life mortality among working women, but it is not known how combinations of these exposures impact mortality, particularly when exposure is assessed cumulatively over the life course. We tested whether, among US women, lifelong work stress and lifelong family circumstances would jointly predict mortality risk.
  
  Procedures
  
  We studied formerly working mothers in the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) born 1924-1957 (n=7,352). We used sequence analysis to determine five prototypical trajectories of marriage and parenthood in our sample. Using detailed information on occupation and industry of each woman’s longest-held job, we assigned each respondent a score for job control and job demands. We calculated age-standardized mortality rates by combined job demands, job control, and family status, then modeled hazard ratios for death based on family constellation, job control tertiles, and their combination.
  
  Results
  
  Married women who had children later in life had the lowest mortality risks (93/1,000). The highest-risk family clusters were characterized by spells of single motherhood (132/1,000). Generally, we observed linear relationships between job control and mortality hazard within each family trajectory. But while mortality risk was high for all long-term single mothers, we did not observe a job control-mortality gradient in this group. The highest-mortality subgroup was previously married women who became single mothers later in life and had low job control (HR 1.91, 95% CI 1.38,2.63).
  
  Practical implications
  
  Studies of associations between psychosocial work characteristics and health might consider heterogeneity of effects by family circumstances. Worksite interventions simultaneously considering both work and family characteristics may be most effective in reducing health risks.
  
  
• Subjects:
  Adult Aged Family Characteristics Female Humans Life Change Events Middle Aged Mortality Mothers Retirement Risk Factors Single Parent Stress, Psychological Women, Working Work

  More +
• Source:
  Soc Sci Med. 146:111-119.
• Pubmed ID:
  26513120
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC4657133
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  K01 OH010673/OH/NIOSH CDC HHS/United States ; R01 AG040248/AG/NIA NIH HHS/United States ; 5R01AG040248/AG/NIA NIH HHS/United States
• Place as Subject:
  United States
• Volume:
  146
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:c5d03381f86d7a0fa04ef5dd0501237efcc72ddabac750e7d6a515f561da5ae6
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/53772/cdc_53772_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 543.07 KB ]