Aging & Social Change: Thirteenth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Living with a partner can have multiple positive influences on individual health and well-being but these effects are conditional on the quality of the partnership. One of the challenges to marital quality in older couples can arise from spousal caregiving where caregiver’s frailty and long caregiving hours can lead to stress and resentment. Caregiving and care receiving can also disrupt couple relationships by challenging long-established marital roles. The first aim of the paper is to describe the prevalence of spousal care in elderly couples in the UK, its intensity and its socio-demographic patterns. The second aim is to test whether and how spousal caregiving and receiving affect older people’s marital quality. Drawing on a life-course perspective, the paper derives hypotheses about factors that threaten or protect the quality of marriages of spousal carers. The first wave of Understanding Society comprises more than 4,000 couples aged 55 or older, which can be followed for up to ten further panel waves. In the first wave, twenty percent of these couples reported spousal caregiving. Descriptive statistics are used to develop profiles of spousal caregiving among older couples. The effects of spousal caregiving on marital quality are estimated from a fixed-effects panel model. Initial analyses show that women provide more care for their partners than vice versa. Individuals in higher-status groups provide less spousal care than those in lower status groups. Caring for a partner does not affect partnership quality. However, partnership cohesion declines when spouses cared for many years or for long hours.