Xue, Baowen;
Lacey, Rebecca E;
Di Gessa, Giorgio;
McMunn, Ann;
(2022)
Does providing informal care in young adulthood impact educational attainment and employment? Evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study.
SocArXiv Papers: Charlottesville, VA, USA.
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Abstract
Most research on the effects of caring has focused on older spouses or working-age carers providing care for older people, but providing care in early adulthood may have longer-term consequences given the importance of this life stage for educational and employment transitions. This study aims to investigate the impact of informal care in early adulthood on educational attainment and employment in the UK, and to test whether these associations differ by gender or socioeconomic circumstances. Data are from young adults (age 16-29 at first interview, n=27,209) in the UK Household Longitudinal Study wave 1 (2009/11) to wave 10 (2018/2020). Carers are those who provide informal care either inside or outside household. We also considered six additional aspects of caring, including weekly hours spent caring, number of people cared for, relationship to care recipient, place of care, age at which caring is first observed, and duration of care. Logistic regression was used to analyse the association with educational qualifications. Cox regression was used to analyse the association with employment transitions, and piecewise models were used to disentangle the short and long-term effects of caring on employment amongst carers. We found that young adult carers were less likely to obtain a university degree and to enter employment, and more likely to enter unemployment and exit from paid employment, compared to young adults who did not provide care. Caring in young adulthood may influence employment both immediately and in the longer term. In terms of care characteristics, weekly hours spent caring is negatively associated with the likelihood of obtaining a degree qualification and being employed. Caring at age 18/19 may have a stronger impact on obtaining a university degree than caring at other ages. Providing care after age 22 negatively impacted employment outcomes. Having a degree qualification and parental educational attainment buffered the negative impact of providing care on employment. Our results highlight the importance of supporting the needs of young adults providing informal care while making key life course transitions.
| Type: | Working / discussion paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Does providing informal care in young adulthood impact educational attainment and employment? Evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.31235/osf.io/vx5rd |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/vx5rd |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an Open Access paper published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | informal care; young adult carers, education, employment, UKHLS |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Epidemiology and Public Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10149456 |
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