Increase in frailty of older workers and retirees predicted by negative psychosocial working conditions on the job

Lucie Kalousova and Carlos Mendes de Leon

Social Science & Medicine, 2015, vol. 124, issue C, 275-283

Abstract: Well-established evidence has shown that negative psychosocial working conditions adversely affect the health and well-being of prime-age workers, yet little is known about the consequences on the health of older workers. Our article examines the associations between declines in health in later life, measured as frailty, and negative psychosocial working conditions, and considers the role of retirement. We use longitudinal cross-national data collected by SHARE I and SHARE IV and focus on the respondents who were working at baseline. We find that low reward, high effort, effort to reward ratio, and effort to control ratio were all predictors of increasing frailty. The association between low reward and change in frailty was modified by retirement status at follow-up, with nonretired respondents in low-reward jobs experiencing the largest increases in frailty at follow-up. These results suggest that the effect of psychosocial working conditions on physical health may extend well past the prime working age, and retirement may have a protective effect on the health of older workers in low reward jobs.

Keywords: Europe; SHARE; Working conditions; Aging; Frailty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614007874
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:124:y:2015:i:c:p:275-283

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.055

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().