The role of occupations in differentiating health trajectories in later life

Abstract

This study characterizes heterogeneous trajectories of health among older Americans and investigates how employment histories differentiate them. Using the 1998-2010 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the impact of longest-held occupations on patterns of limitations in activities of daily living. We use latent class growth analysis to identify distinct health trajectory classes and linear growth curve analysis to model the pattern of limitation accumulation for individuals. All analyses are stratified by sex and race, to account for differential labor markets and health experiences of these demographic groups. A limitation of this analysis is its reliance on broad occupational categories rather than specific measures of working conditions. In future work, we plan to incorporate data on specific occupations and merge them with detailed information on occupational characteristics available in the O*NET database (an online repository that has updated the Dictionary of Occupational Titles used in previous research on aging and retirement and occupational epidemiology: http://www.onetonline.org/).