Tracing the Health Consequences of Family Support

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

When faced with health and economic challenges, Americans often rely on family members, including those who are not coresident, to provide time help, financial assistance, and shared housing. Yet, for many disadvantaged Americans, the increased need for help from family often comes at a time when the ability of family to provide help is diminished. Public transfers designed to alleviate economic hardships may interact with family transfers, but the combined effects are unknown. Despite the interdependence of health and economic challenges across generations and the effect of family support on health outcomes in the face of challenges, most research on the effects of health and economic challenges focuses on individuals and households. This project fills this gap in the research creating a multidimensional contextual database linked to the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the effects of health and economic challenges across generations of American families. The HRS and PSID have collected data on the health and well-being of individuals and their family members for decades, include supplements on health and economic challenges and on public and private transfers to combat these challenges, and will continue indefinitely to support an understanding of the health impacts in the future. This project enhances these data by building a contextual database linkable to the generations of families in the HRS and PSID across dimensions of exposure to risk; state, local, and school policies; local economic conditions; health care availability; preexisting health factors; and economic differences. The proposed project addresses four Aims: (1) build and maintain a multidimensional contextual database linked to generations of HRS and PSID families; (2) describe how health and economic challenges differed across groups and were shared within families; (3) assess how care, financial support, and coresidence from family members responded to health and economic challenges and how each interacted with public transfer programs; and (4) study the physical and mental health effects of these challenges and whether family support and public transfers mitigated negative health effects. Differences across race-ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sex, age and retirement status, and family structure are assessed in each aim. Causal effects of the impact of health and economic challenges will be estimated using a combination of subjective assessments elicited from respondents and analytic strategies. The results provide a comprehensive understanding of the health and economic challenges faced by American families and how they impact their physical and mental health. Consortium collaborations will facilitate harmonization of contextual factors and health outcomes and support dissemination of the contextual data resource to the broader research community.