Search

During COVID‐19 many informal caregivers experienced increased caregiving load while access to formal and informal support systems and coping resources decreased. Little is known about the psychosocial costs of these challenges for an essential yet vulnerable and "hidden" frontline workforce. This study explores and compares changes in psychosocial well‐being (psychological well‐being, psychological ill‐being, and loneliness) before and across up to three stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic among caregivers and non‐caregivers. We also examine predictors of psychosocial well‐being among caregivers during the peak of the pandemic. We use longitudinal data collected online in the Norwegian Counties Public Health Survey (age: 18–92) in four counties and up to four data points (n = 14,881). Caregivers are those who provide care unpaid, continuous (≥ monthly across all time points) help to someone with health problems. Findings show that levels of psychosocial well‐being first remained stable but later, during the peak stages of the pandemic, dropped markedly. Caregivers (13–15% of the samples) report lower psychosocial well‐being than non‐caregivers both before and during the pandemic. Caregivers seem especially vulnerable in terms of ill‐being, and during the peak of the pandemic caregivers report higher net levels of worry (OR = 1.22, p < 0.01) and anxiety (OR = 1.23, p < 0.01) than non‐caregivers. As expected, impacts are graver for caregivers who provide more intensive care and those reporting health problems or poor access to social support. Our study findings are valuable information for interventions to support caregivers during this and future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the associations between nonstandard work schedules, parents' mental health, and couple relationship happiness across childhood using the Millennium Cohort Study, a longitudinal, population-based data set of births in the UK. Using individual fixed effects models, we investigated the relationship between maternal and paternal nonstandard work schedules, examining both separate and joint work schedules and mental health and relationship happiness. Although we did not observe any associations between mothers' nonstandard work schedules and their mental health, we did find regularly working night schedules were associated with lower relationship happiness, and particularly so during the school-age period. Fathers' evening and weekend work schedules were associated with worse mental health. The joint work schedule in which mothers worked a standard schedule and fathers worked nonstandard schedules was associated with lower relationship happiness for mothers and worse mental health for fathers. These results demonstrate the salience of incorporating fathers' work schedules to understand the challenges and benefits to families of nonstandard work schedules. Our study also emphasizes the significance of investigating the family consequences of nonstandard work schedules in different country contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To Bourdieu, interaction with culture has symbolic power and drives the manifestation of social stratification. Many have adapted his theory and methodology, developing new models of cultural engagement. Here, to further integrate these theoretical and methodological approaches, Bourdieu's tools were used to operationalise and interpret a Latent Class Analysis of cultural engagement in the Understanding Society dataset. Six classes of increasing engagement were established, and were increasingly correlated with youth, capital and social advantage. However, some qualitative differences in engagement were also seen. The classes also varied by which characteristics correlated with membership. For example, economic capital was associated with sports engagement, while advantaged social position was associated with broad-scale engagement. Overall, this analysis combined Bourdieusian theory with contemporary methodology in the largest representative UK dataset and highlights the broader relevance of cultural engagement patterns in indicating (and possibly generating) status, identity, capital and social position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]