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

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.

We have identified 5 distinct user groups who may benefit from our research 1) Policy makers and advisers 2) Older persons' and other interest groups 3) the wider public 4) academic audiences and 5) Commercial and private sector organisations.
1. Policy makers and advisers
We will target government departments such as Department of Work and Pensions, the Health and Safety Executive and the Department of Health who will benefit from information on individual, family, workplace and local area factors from across life that influence retirement decisions in later life. We anticipate these departments to also have interests in comparisons with other countries and in estimates of working years lost for different sections of the population.
2. Older persons' and other interest groups
Our findings will be highly relevant to charities such as AgeUK who will be able to provide advice to older people about the types of employment in which older people may most readily work. Charities with a health condition focus e.g. MIND and Arthritis Research-UK will be able to highlight workplace factors that may help promote extended working for people with specific conditions.
3. Wider public - including employers and employees
The research will identify work environments in which older people can and do work, including those conducive to good health of older employees. This will help employers to identify features of occupations which might be modified so that they can retain their experienced staff. It will provide information that may help older people in making decisions related to timing of their retirement.
4. Academic beneficiaries
Life course approaches to understanding working in later life are beginning to be embraced more widely. Our project will contribute to this as well as to building a more complete picture of the interplay between workplace, health and family influences on extended working. The project will raise the profile of all the data sets, some of which are ESRC supported. It will exemplify longitudinal data analysis approaches in this field in the UK and beyond, benefitting both early career and established researchers. We will document our analytic and data harmonisation approaches which will benefit other researchers using these cohorts.
The project will contribute towards the health of social science in the UK through the development of new and established highly skilled researchers in cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary areas. This is vital where social science as a discipline and social scientists as individuals will make ongoing contributions to evidence-based policy making and will influence public policies and legislation at local, regional and national levels. Skills in the analysis of quantitative data are vital for the continuing growth, prosperity and economic competitiveness of the UK. The government's continued investment in higher education and skills training at a time when many other services are facing severe cuts along with the ESRC's recent investment in new quantitative data initiatives focusing on undergraduate and postgraduate training is evidence of this importance.
5. Commercial and private sector
Our project aims to identify multiple factors that may influence timing and type (that is, voluntary or disability-related) of retirement, and whether these factors differ by gender and socioeconomic background. We anticipate this may be of interest to pension companies developing and refining pension provision estimates for subsequent cohorts of employees. We have existing links with Legal and General.