THE IMPACT OF WORK AND FAMILY ROLES ON LIFE OUTCOMES IN LATE ADULTHOOD

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We propose to investigate the extent to which work and family trajectories across the life course affect physical and mental health and financial well-being in later adulthood either directly or through'their effects on more proximate predictors of these outcomes. To what extent are health and financial well-being among older adults affected by individuals' contemporaneous work, family, and other circumstances and to what extent are such outcomes due to life-course patterns of experiences in the family and the labor market? How do all of these processes differ for women and men? The meaning and nature of the retirement years has changed in fundamental ways in recent decades. Given that successful aging has increasingly come to depend on individuals' own planning and resources at earlier ages; given broad social changes that have redefined employment relationships, women's rates of participation in the paid labor market, and rates of marital dissolution; given growing heterogeneity in men's and women's work and family trajectories; and given growing heterogeneity in the well-being of older Americans in recent cohorts, our investigation of the impact of life course patterns of work and family circumstances on health and financial well-being in later adulthood is timely and important. Like the other proposals that comprise this P01, our work is fundamentally concerned with understanding the determinants of the well-being of older Americans in an era of changing social, economic, and policy contexts. The WLS data include detailed information about family circumstances and transitions across the life course; labor force experiences across the career; and physical and mental health and financial well-being at two points betweenages 54 and 65. We will use group-based trajectory modeling techniques to characterize the trajectories of family circumstancesand transitions from birth through age 65 and trajectories of labor force experiences and exposures from age 36 through age 65. Cognizant of the complexities and endogeneities in the causal relationships involved, we will then estimate the impact of these work and family trajectories (separately for men and women) on health and financial well-being in later adulthood before and after controlling for more proximate influences on these outcomes. PERFORMANCE