IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0148916.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effect of Intra- and Intergenerational Caregiving on Subjective Well-Being – Evidence of a Population Based Longitudinal Study among Older Adults in Germany

Author

Listed:
  • André Hajek
  • Hans-Helmut König

Abstract

Objective: To examine whether intra- and intergenerational caregiving affect subjective well-being (SWB) of the caregivers longitudinally. Methods: Data were drawn from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS), which is a population-based longitudinal study of individuals living in Germany aged 40 and over. The waves in 2002, 2008 and 2011 were used (with 10,434 observations). SWB was examined in a broad sense, covering affective (AWB) and cognitive well-being (CWB), positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) as well as functional and mental health. While intragenerational caregiving was defined as providing care for spouse/partner, intergenerational caregiving was defined as providing care for mother, father, mother-in-law, father-in-law, partner’s mother or partner’s father. Results: Fixed effects regressions adjusting for sociodemographic factors, social network, self-efficacy and morbidity showed that intergenerational informal care did not affect the various SWB outcome measures. Intragenerational caregiving affected CWB (women) and mental health (total sample and men), whereas it did not affect the other outcome variables. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the importance of intragenerational caregiving for mental health (men) and cognitive well-being (women). Consequently, interventions to avoid mental illness due to intragenerational caregiving are urgently needed.

Suggested Citation

  • André Hajek & Hans-Helmut König, 2016. "The Effect of Intra- and Intergenerational Caregiving on Subjective Well-Being – Evidence of a Population Based Longitudinal Study among Older Adults in Germany," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-11, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0148916
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148916
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148916
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148916&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0148916?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zwar, Larissa & König, Hans-Helmut & Hajek, André, 2020. "Psychosocial consequences of transitioning into informal caregiving in male and female caregivers: Findings from a population-based panel study," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 264(C).
    2. Regina Gerlich & Tobias Wolbring, 2021. "“In Good Times and in Bad, in Sickness and in Health”: A Longitudinal Analysis on Spousal Caregiving and Life Satisfaction," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 22(3), pages 1481-1516, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0148916. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.