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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 integration of life course and stress process frameworks constitutes a useful model for advancing a research agenda on the stressors and corollary mental health impacts of the social disruptions and dislocations defining life in the early twenty-first century. Social changes interrupt life paths and produce potentially stressful circumstances at particular time points in biographies already defined, shaped, and constrained at the intersections of race, class, nativity, age, and gender. Critical for both science and policy development is a mental health research agenda on the nature and consequences of the uneven stresses of social changes as they play out at different life course stages in disparate ways depending on people’s intersecting social locations.

Research indicates that anticipation of future needs is the primary reason behind an aged adult's decision to move to a continuing care retirement community. Choice of facilities is directed by its closeness to friends and family, management style, and reputation. Data were obtained via surveys of 91 senior citizens aged 65 to 95 who were relocating to a retirement community in upstate New York.

Although employment growth in this industry is projected to be among the fastest in the economy over the 1988-2000 period, the rate of growth should slow as demographic pressures ease [...]

Byline: MARC FREEDMAN and PHYLLIS MOEN At age 55, Steve Weiner began to think about retiring from a satisfying 30-year career in higher education. He had gotten his Ph.D. in [...]

The links between formal community participation in the United States and psychological well-being is examined by focusing on retirement as a key status transition. It is stated that in the United States, midcourse retirees who are working for pay or actively participating in their communities without pay seem to be the best off in terms of life quality.

We draw on panel data from a randomized field experiment to assess the effects of a flexibility/supervisor support initiative called STAR on turnover intentions and voluntary turnover among professional technical workers in a large firm. An unanticipated exogenous shock—the announcement of an impending merger—occurred in the middle of data collection. Both organizational changes reflect an emerging employment contract characterized by increasing employee temporal flexibility even as employers wield greater flexibility in reorganizing their workforces. We theorized STAR would reduce turnover intentions and actual turnover by making it more attractive to stay with the current employer. We found being in a STAR team (versus a usual practice team) lowered turnover intentions 12 months later and reduced the risk of voluntary turnover over almost three years. We also examined potential mechanisms accounting for the effects of these two organizational changes; STAR effects on reducing turnover intentions are partially mediated by reducing work-to-family conflict, family-to-work conflict, burnout, psychological distress, perceived stress, and increasing job satisfaction. The effect of learning about the merger on increasing turnover intentions is fully mediated by increased job insecurity. STAR also moderates the negative effects of learning about the merger on turnover intentions for different subgroups. Findings provide insights into the effectiveness of an organizational intervention, the dynamics of organizations, and how competing logics of two organizational changes affect employees’ labor market expectations and behavior.Utilizamos datos de panel de un experimento de campo aleatorio para evaluar los efectos de una iniciativa de apoyo a la flexibilidad/el supervisor denominada STAR sobre la rotación de intenciones y la rotación voluntaria entre los trabajadores profesionales y técnicos de una gran empresa. Un choque exógeno inesperado –el anuncio de una fusión inminente– se produjo en medio de la recopilación de datos. Ambos cambios organizativos reflejan un contrato de empleo emergente caracterizado por aumentar la flexibilidad temporal del empleado aun cuando los empleadores mantienen una mayor flexibilidad en reorganizar su fuerza laboral. Teorizamos que STAR reduciría la rotación de intenciones y rotación actual haciendo más atractivo quedarse con el actual empleador. Encontramos que estar en un equipo de STAR (frente a un equipo de práctica habitual) redujo la rotación de intenciones doce meses después y redujo el riesgo de rotación voluntaria por casi tres años. También examinamos mecanismos potenciales que explican los efectos de estos dos cambios organizativos. Los efectos de STAR sobre la reducción de rotación de intenciones son parcialmente mediados por la reducción de conflictos entre el trabajo y la familia, el conflicto entre la familia y el trabajo, el agotamiento, la angustia psicológica, el estrés percibido y el aumento de la satisfacción laboral. El efecto del aprendizaje sobre la fusión de aumento de rotación de intenciones está mediado por el incremento de inseguridad laboral. STAR también modera los efectos negativos del aprendizaje sobre la fusión de rotación de intenciones para diferentes subgrupos. Los hallazgos proporcionan información sobre la eficacia de una intervención organizativa, la dinámica de organizaciones y la forma en que las lógicas competitivas de dos cambios organizativos afectan las expectativas y el comportamiento del mercado laboral de los empleados.

To evaluate the effects of a workplace-based intervention on actigraphic and self-reported sleep outcomes in an extended-care setting.

Observational studies have linked work-family issues with cigarette consumption. This study examined the 6-month effects on cigarette consumption of a work-family supportive organisational intervention among nursing home workers.

To examine the effects of a workplace flexibility/support intervention on employees' sleep quantity and quality during nights and days and whether the effects differ by employee age.

Work-family conflict is a threat to healthy sleep behaviors among employees. This study aimed to examine how Work-to-Family Conflict (demands from work that interfere with one's family/personal life; WTFC) and Family-to-Work Conflict (demands from family/personal life that interfere with work; FTWC) are associated with several dimensions of sleep among information technology workers.

The Work, Family, and Health Network Study tested the hypothesis that a workplace intervention designed to increase family-supportive supervision and employee control over work time improves actigraphic measures of sleep quantity and quality.

Using General Social Survey data, we examine whether any association between job insecurity and well-being is contingent on economic climate (comparing those interviewed in turbulent 2010 vs. pre-recessionary 2006), as well as income and gender. We find respondents with higher levels of job insecurity in 2010 reported lower levels of happiness compared to those similarly insecure in 2006. The positive relationship between job insecurity and days of poor mental health becomes more pronounced for those in the third quartile of personal income in 2010, suggesting middle-class vulnerability during the economic downturn. Men (but not women) with higher insecurity report more days of poor mental health in both 2006 and 2010. These findings reinforce a “cycles of control” theoretical approach, given the mental health–job insecurity relationship is heightened for workers in turbulent times.

We investigate employees’ expectations and planning about a key later life course transition, retirement. Drawing on an organizationally derived sample of workers in dual-earner households in upstate New York, we find that personal mastery, along with health, income, and job conditions, are key predictors of planning. Also important are prior biographical pacing, gender, and relational contexts (at home and at work). Members of today's mostly baby boom cohort tend to plan more financially than for life after retirement, and most anticipate retiring earlier than the conventional age of 65.

Using a representative sample of 3,381 American workers, this study investigates relationships among work/life policies, informal support, and employee loyalty over the life course (defined by age and parental status and age of youngest child). The central thesis is that our understanding of the impact of work/life policies on employee loyalty will be enriched by consideration of the non-work and work contexts that influence employee attitudes and behavior. The relationship between employee child care policies and loyalty varies for women and men at different stages of parenthood. Flexible-time policies have a consistent, positive association with employee loyalty with some variation based on life stage. Informal support (via supervisors and co-workers) has the greatest positive relationship with employee loyalty.

This article draws on life history data of the cohorts of recent U.S. retirees to examine the temporal patterning of retirement. Three major dimensionshistorical context, social heterogeneity, and, most important, biographical pacing, measured by cohort, gender, and career pathway, respectivelyoperate simultaneously, yet unevenly, to affect various aspects of the retirement process. Findings suggest that changes over the past few decades have undermined the regularity in retirement timing that was a product of the convergence of diverse institutional features, anchored by a large core of men on traditional career tracks. Focusing on retirement, our model underscores the multiplex nature of the temporal structuring of the life course.

AbstractStudies of work and family conflict often overlook the late midlife stage and often do not consider the relationship between past employment and the current marital strain of both spouses. In this paper, we employ a life course perspective to examine the conjoint influences of each spouse's past and present work experiences on the marital quality of both spouses in late midlife, considering spouses' gender role ideologies as possible moderators of the relationship between employment and marital quality. Interviews and life histories with a total sample of 456 retirees and their spouses, ages 50–72, conducted in 1994–95, reveal that husbands' higher marital strain is predicted by current work conditions in the household: when either spouse is the only one employed in late midlife, husbands experience less marital strain, but when both are employed, husbands report higher marital strain. Husbands' egalitarian gender role ideology, coupled with their having had a professional/managerial career, is also linked to higher marital strain. Husbands' positive marital quality reflects a consistency between men's own gender role attitudes and whether their wives had long employment careers: egalitarian husbands report high positive marital quality in proportion to the length of time their wives were in the labor force. Wives' marital strain and positive marital quality are most directly linked to their husbands' marital strain and feeling of positive marital quality, and not significantly predicted by the same predictors of their husbands' marital quality.

Panel data from a sample of 313 women who were wives and mothers in 1956 and were interviewed both in 1956 and in 1986 are used to consider the pathways that lead to health and social integration. Possible relationships were explored between the number, duration, timing, and episodes of various nonfamily roles throughout adult-hood and subsequent health and multiple-role occupancy. It was found that occupying multiple roles in 1956, participating in volunteer work on an intermittent basis, and belonging to a club or organization were positively related to various measures of health and that occupying multiple roles in 1956, as well as doing volunteer work, was positively related to occupying multiple roles in 1986.

Abstract: Like the topic of family policy itself, research informing family policies is difficult to characterize. This article discusses how ideology and values influence research agendas and then describes three types of studies informing family policies: research defining social issues, evaluation research, and research about the policy-making process. Two case studies illustrate how social research informs family policy: in promoting gender equality in Scandinavia and in reforming child support in the United States. Values of individualism and the sanctity of the family have traditionally focused policy makers' and, hence, researchers' attention on individuals, not families, as the units of analysis. But dramatic shifts in family structure and functioning along with renewed public concern about family disintegration are placing families high on the policy agenda. Both “basic” and “applied” family scholars can contribute to a research agenda examining the factors promoting strong, effective families.

This study investigates the effects of an organizational flexibility/support initiative on Boomers’ expectations of working longer. Most research on retirement planning is based on studies of earlier cohorts and may not capture the unique experiences of Boomers. We draw on U.S. data from the Work Family and Health Network’s randomized control study of an organizational redesign (called STAR) that offers employees greater control over when and where they work and greater supervisor support for their personal lives to investigate its relationship to the subsequent retirement expectations of 287 Boomer professionals and managers aged 50–64 in an information technology (IT) division of a large Fortune 500 corporation. We use multinomial logistic regression to assess whether being randomized to the STAR treatment is associated with Boomers expecting a later age of retiring and of exiting the workforce, as well as their subjective assessments of the probability of their working for pay at ages 65 and 67. We find that STAR predicts Boomers’ expectations of retiring later, but not expectations of age of exiting the workforce or of a postretirement encore job. Women respondents, working in the same IT jobs as men and with long tenure, nevertheless expect to retire earlier than their male colleagues. We draw on in-depth qualitative interviews to contextualize our results and promote understanding of how changes in the work environment might shape Boomers’ expectations of retirement. Findings suggest that initiatives like STAR promoting greater control and support could help organizations retain their older professional (in this case, IT) workforces.

Americans are living healthier and longer lives, but the shifting age distribution is straining existing and projected social welfare protections for older adults (e.g., Social Security, Medicare). One solution is to delay retirement. Another is an alternative to “total leisure” retirement―an “encore” stage of paid or unpaid engagement coming after career jobs but before infirmities associated with old age. We draw on gendered life course themes together with data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2009) to examine the real time American men and women ages 50 to 75 apportion to paid work and unpaid volunteer work on an average day, as well as factors predicting their time allocations. We find that while full-time employment declines after the 50s, many Americans allot time to more limited engagements–working part time, being self-employed, volunteering, helping out–through and even beyond their 60s. Caring for a child or infirm adult reduces the odds of paid work but not volunteering. While time working for pay declines with age (though more slowly for men than women), time volunteering does not. Older men and women in poor health, without a college degree, with a disability or SSI income are the least likely to be publicly engaged. This social patterning illustrates that while the ideal of an encore of paid or unpaid voluntary, flexible, and meaningful engagement is an emerging reality for some, it appears less attainable for others. This suggests the importance of organizational and public policy innovations offering all Americans a range of encore opportunities.

We investigate the turnover effects of an organizational innovation (ROWE—Results Only Work Environment) aimed at moving away from standard time practices to focus on results rather than time spent at work. To model rates of turnover, we draw on survey data from a sample of employees at a corporate headquarters (N = 775) and institutional records of turnover over eight months following the ROWE implementation. We find the odds of turnover are indeed lower for employees participating in the ROWE initiative, which offers employees greater work-time control and flexibility, and that this is the case regardless of employees' gender, age, or family life stage. ROWE also moderates the turnover effects of organizational tenure and negative home-to-work spillover, physical symptoms, and job insecurity, with those in ROWE who report these situations generally less likely to leave the organization. Additionally, ROWE reduces turnover intentions among those remaining with the corporation. This research moves the “opting-out” argument from one of private troubles to an issue of greater employee work-time control and flexibility by showing that an organizational policy initiative can reduce turnover.

Discusses the benefits for married couples to be employed in the same workplace. Influence of working together on work and family lives; Increase in social capital; Support given by supervisors.

Using data on a sub-sample of workers in dual-earner families (from the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce), we examine the strategies they use to manage work/life pressures, as well as how these strategies, along with workers' life stage and work conditions, predict multiple measures of psychological life quality (low work/family conflict, stress, and overload, along with high coping/mastery). We find that strategies and work conditions are gendered, with workers in dual-earner couples most apt to be in neotraditional arrangements (husbands in professional and/or long-hour jobs and wives working fewer hours, often in non-professional occupations). Life quality is gendered as well, with women in dual-earner arrangements reporting more stress and overload, as well as lower levels of coping/mastery than men. However, the factors associated with life quality are similar across gender, with conditions at work serving as key predictors of life quality indicators for both men and women. Specifically, having a demanding job and job insecurity are associated with low life quality, while having a supportive supervisor is positively linked to life quality outcomes. Work hours and work-hour preferences matter as well. Men and women in couples where both spouses work regular (39–25) full-time hours, tend to score high on indicators of life quality, while those working long hours and those preferring to work less, are less likely to do so.