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4/15/2006 12:05:00 AM

Today's elder caregivers are likely to be tomorrow's elderly poor

The absence of adequate federal support to help care for the elderly is forcing women in many families to reduce their hours of employment or leave their jobs altogether to take care of an elderly parent. New research shows that women caregivers, particularly those in their 50s, have higher odds of experiencing poverty when they become elderly than do women who are not caregivers.

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In light of America's rapidly aging population and decreases in federal funding, elder care has become a critical issue for many families. The burden for such care generally falls on women, with the result that their earnings decline significantly and, as one study shows, they are at greater risk of eventually living in poverty than noncaregivers.  

"Caregiving can be almost like a full-time job," said Katharine Donato, an associate professor of sociology at Rice University and co-author of a study on the long-term consequences of elder caregiving on women's economic well-being.

"If a woman can no longer work or needs to reduce her hours of employment to care for an elderly parent, that leads to greater risks of poverty later."

What Donato and Rice University postdoctoral researcher Chizuko Wakabayashi found in a study of more than 600 women was that those living in poverty households at age 65 or older were twice as likely to have been caregivers in their 50s than women who were not poor. Women who were caregivers in 1991, for example, were more than twice as likely to be receiving public assistance and nearly three times as likely to be covered by Medicaid eight years later than women of the same age who had not cared for an elderly parent.

Women's economic status also appeared to correspond with the status of their health and employment. Those who were poor in 1999, for example, were more likely to report worse health than those who were not poor. Sixty percent of women receiving public assistance reported poor or fair health, compared to 16 percent of nonrecipients.

Women living below the poverty level who were receiving public assistance in 1999 had worked between 10 and 11 hours a week in 1991. Those women who were not poor had worked twice as many hours.

Overall, the statistics for women eight years after they cared for and survived an elderly parent portrayed a very bleak picture compared to those women who were not caregivers, according to the Rice researchers. The risk of living in poverty for caregivers who stopped working was shown to be 4.7 times higher than that for noncaregivers who stopped working. The likelihood of caregivers who stopped working to receive public assistance was 73 percent higher than that for noncaregivers who stopped working.

Forthcoming in the September 2006 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the study by Donato and Wakabayashi uses a sample of 685 women from the Health and Retirement Study who were 65 years or older in 1999-2000 and who had at least one living parent in 1991-1992. The researchers conducted quantitative analysis in which they used multivariate regression models to assess the effects of caregiving on the risks of three variables of poverty: living below the poverty threshold, receiving public assistance and receiving Medicaid.

Knowing there are many factors related to poverty and elderly poverty in particular, Donato and her colleague were specifically interested in the extent to which caregiving affects the likelihood a person will become poor later in life. They were also curious about whether caregiving heightened the negative effects that poor health and stopping work had on a woman's risk of living in poverty.

"It's clear from our findings that women caregivers may not adequately prepare for their own aging," Donato said. "Given their numbers, the implications for policymakers are fairly significant.

"If elderly poverty increases because women have taken time to care for a parent, who's going to take care of those women?"

A member of Rice's sociology faculty since 2000, Donato has also written extensively about Mexican immigration to the U.S., including the ways in which social networks affect the health of Mexican families and the consequences of Mexican immigration for new U.S. destination areas. Her study of immigrants from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic was the first to document that today's labor market conditions for those newer immigrant groups are the same as or worse than Mexican migrants' have experienced since Congress passed the IRCA in 1986.  

Donato's research has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Social Forces, International Migration Review, International Migration, Population Research and Policy Review, and Social Science Quarterly.

For more information on this research, contact Donato at kmd@rice.edu or B.J. Almond in the Office of News and Media Relations at balmond@rice.edu.