A Lifetime of Experience: Modelling Labour Market and Family Life Course Histories Among Older Adults in Britain

From the perspective of the life course, socio-economically based inequalities in health among older adults may be better understood in the context of the life course experiences that precede them. In particular, labour market experiences and family roles during the working years, including the ways in which they are gendered, may offer insight into how inequalities in health emerge in the first place. Yet, assessing the influence of detailed labour market participation and family role histories on inequalities in health among older adults presents particular methodological challenges for life course researchers. In this work, labour market and family experiences from young adulthood to retirement age are modeled using retrospective life course history data from the British Household Panel Survey. A two-stage latent class analysis is applied to identify underlying work-family role configurations at various points across the life course and articulate latent life paths that link these experiences over time. Theoretical considerations, along with indices of model fit, suggest that four latent life paths broadly characterize the experiences of the older adults in this sample. These life paths are distinguished by gender, labour market and family care activities, and by the presence of dependent children in the household. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these latent life paths for research on socio-economic inequalities in health among older adults in Britain.