Multiple roles and psychological well-being in a national sample of older adults.

Activity theory and the role enhancement hypothesis predict that multiple role involvement in late life is linked to greater psychological well-being, but the disengagement hypothesis and the role change hypothesis anticipate a negative association between these variables. In this study, the association between multiple roles and psychological well-being is tested among adults age 60 and over from a national sample. Three measures of well-being are regressed on background variables, number of roles (from among employee, spouse, parent, volunteer, homemaker, grandparent, caregiver, and student), and interaction terms. Multiple roles are associated with higher life satisfaction and self-efficacy and lower depressive symptoms. A significant interaction shows larger regression coefficients for roles among men than women on life satisfaction, and a three-way interaction indicates a stronger association of roles with self-efficacy for Black men than the other three gender-ethnicity combinations. Findings support the role enhancement hypothesis and the activity perspective among older adults.

A causal analysis of employment and health in midlife women.

According to the "healthy worker" hypothesis, good health selects women into the employment role; conversely, the social causation hypothesis argues that important social roles such as employment can contribute to health. The relationship between these two variables may be of special concern to women at midlife, as both issues become increasingly salient. In this paper a model hypothesizing a nonrecursive (reciprocal) causal relationship between employment (hours employed) and health was presented. Because of the importance of both employment and health for women at midlife, the model was tested in a sample of 463 women ages 40-64 from a national cross-sectional dataset. Two-stage least squares regression supported the hypothesis that employment and health have a positive reciprocal relationship for women at midlife. In addition, married women and those with a child had better health but were likely to work fewer hours for pay. The same model tested in 21 to 39-year-old women was not significant. The results serve to emphasize the importance of examining assumptions about direction of causality in research on work and well-being at midlife.