Social Inequalities in Ageing Societies (SocIAS): Work-Care-Reconciliation in Later Life and Their (Unequal) Health and Participation Consequences from a Comparative Welfare State Perspective

• Applicant: Ariane Bertogg, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 545836874

The aim of this project is to study new forms of inequality emerging in the second half of life in Europe. The various challenges arising from demographic aging have been met with policy responses (such as prolonging working lives and incentivizing family-based caregiving), which have implications for work-care reconciliation in the second half of life. Work-care reconciliation comes at various costs for affected individuals, including poverty risk, and physical and mental health problems, which seem to differ between social groups (e.g., gender, education, class, ethnicity). This may further increase the already existing, well-documented, social-structural gaps in cognitive functioning and social participation. Welfare policy responses to demographic ageing may moderate the socially stratified patterns in work-care reconciliation issues, and their cognitive and participation consequences. Yet, political responses to demographic ageing are embedded in welfare regimes with their cultural ideas and normative ideals as underpinnings. This project addresses these questions with four research foci, each addressed in a separate work package. The aims of these work packages are: (1) to document the consequences of work-care reconciliation (or conflict) for cognitive functioning and social participation in later life and thereby document the wider consequences of work-care conflict; (2) to detect between-group inequalities in these consequences and identify potentially vulnerable groups for later life exclusion or loss of independence; (3) to investigate the role that different welfare policies and their cultural foundations may play in mitigating such inequalities; (4) to systematize and synthesize existing theoretical approaches into an overarching conceptual framework which is suited to explain later-life inequalities across different levels and dimension of individual and societal life. The project takes a multi-dimensional perspective on social inequalities in older age. Based on large-scale comparative secondary data sets, such as the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the project address these research questions with a theory-driven quantitative empirical research approach. For each of the three empirical work packages, a doctoral student (WP1 and WP2) or postdoctoral researcher (WP3) with the needed expertise and methodological skills will be engaged to support the project. The fourth work package will be conducted by the applicant.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups