Integrated studies of working later in life: individual and contextual determinants of extended working

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With the growth of the older population predicted to continue in coming decades, it is increasingly important to understand how to encourage work participation in older people in jobs that will be satisfying and will promote healthy ageing. This project will explore characteristics of individuals and their family, workplace and living environments that promote working beyond age 50. Existing research has identified several factors that make a person more or less likely to retire from paid work including their health, financial circumstances, pension provision, their partner's health and partner's employment status and these have different contributions depending on whether we consider voluntary or disability-related retirement. These determinants have typically been measured around the time of retirement. Using long-running surveys, including some surveys which have been following a set of people from birth onwards, we will look further back in a person's life to see if there are factors which can be identified earlier on that could help identify early intervention points and help us understand more about how the health and social circumstances of an individual and their family across life promote or inhibit options for extended working.Work environments may be more or less supportive of extended working. We will use several on-going surveys, including some occupational surveys that have recorded detailed information on a person's work environment across most of their career. We will examine features of workplaces and jobs, such as the extent of autonomy, control and satisfaction that an employee has in their work, their working hours, and the physical demands of the job. We will consider whether any of these work-related factors contribute to helping or hindering older people with long-term musculoskeletal or psychological ill health to remain in work. Although there are considerable regional differences in the proportions of older people that are in work, studies have not yet explored what underlies these differences between regions. We will examine whether the local context, including local area unemployment rates and other characteristics of local industry, at various points in time over the last four decades or more contributes to extended working. These are known to be related to an individual's likelihood of being in paid work across the age range of working adults but their particular relevance for working in later life, and the ways in which they might interact with individual characteristics, is not yet clear. Finally, we will consider the national setting. The employment rate of older people varies substantially across countries, which indicates that national policies and cultural norms of extended working could contribute to retirement decisions. We have identified several surveys from Europe which will allow us to compare health and workplace characteristics with our UK studies.The project makes excellent use of existing surveys that have been invested in over several decades so we will not have to collect new data. A key part of the analysis will be to standardise the data from the various surveys as much as is possible. We will then use statistical techniques to look at whether the likelihood of working beyond 50 years of age (with and without a chronic musculoskeletal or psychological condition) differs according to individual, workplace, or local area factors.We will be developing these research questions and sharing research findings with a range of interested parties through written reports, presentations at conferences (including a conference we will organise to bring together people working in different disciplines and service sectors), a project website, our links with Government and employers, and, where appropriate, through the national media.