This article was originally published in June 2016.
Demography, one of the world’s leading social science journals, has published a Life Course Centre working paper, The family life course and health: Partnership, fertility histories, and later life physical health trajectories in Australia. This study is the first to consider how a combined classification of marital and fertility histories over a long period of the life course is associated with later life general and functional health, and provides a new approach to understanding the position of the family in health inequalities.
Life course perspectives suggest that later-life health reflects long-term social patterns over an individual’s life: in particular, the occurrence and timing of key roles and transitions. Such social patterns have been demonstrated empirically for multiple aspects of fertility and partnership histories, including timing of births and marriage, parity, and the presence and timing of a marital disruption. Until recently, most previous studies have focussed on particular aspects of fertility or partnership histories, and on cross-sectional associations between family statuses and health or on short-term changes in health associated with family transitions. Such analyses are limited in their ability to examine the lifelong histories of biological, social, and psychological development reflected in observed health differences.
This study builds on prior research by examining how a holistic classification of family life course trajectories from ages 18 to 50, incorporating both fertility and partnership histories, is linked to later-life physical health.
Key findings:
- Long-term family life course trajectories are strongly linked to later-life health for men, but only minimally for women.
- Men’s physical health are dependent on the occurrence and timing of major life course events – family trajectories characterized by early family formation, no family formation, an early marital disruption, or high fertility are associated with poorer physical health.
- Among women, only those who experienced both a disrupted marital history and a high level of fertility were found to be in poorer health.
Publication authors:
Martin O’Flaherty, RHD candidate and Life Course Centre Fellow
Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland
Janeen Baxter, Director, Life Course Centre
Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland
Michele Haynes, Chief Investigator and Training Program Coordinator, Life Course Centre
Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland
Gavin Turrell, contributing author
Institute for Health & Ageing, Australian Catholic University
This article was originally released as part of the Life Course Centre Working Paper Series.