By Jennifer M. McGivney
How does a lifetime of physically demanding work affect health in later life? A new study from UMass Boston explores that question.
The choice of a job—and its physical demands—will affect a worker’s health long after retirement, according to a new study led by Sung Park, Ph.D., an assistant professor of gerontology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Park was curious about the correlation between work and health. She also wondered about the association between race/ethnicity and work conditions, and how that association might contribute to health disparities among older adults.
Findings from her study were published recently in the journal Demography. The article, Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Functional Limitations Among U.S.-born Older Adults: Examining the Role of Physically Demanding Work, was co-authored by Park, Anne R. Pebley, Noreen Goldman, Boriana Pratt, and Mara Getz Sheftel.
“In the United States, we spend a lot of our adult life at work, and yet it’s not clear how that work impacts us beyond money and benefits such as healthcare,” says Park. “This study looks at the physical demands performed by Americans throughout their working lives to understand how physical health in later life is affected by this differential exposure, by race and ethnicity.”
Past studies have established that Black and Hispanic workers are more likely to perform more physically demanding work than white workers. But one question remained for Park and her research team: What are the long-term health effects of that cumulative exposure?
Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the researchers analyzed retrospective information on HRS participants’ employment histories from young adulthood to middle age. They quantified the portion of respondents’ working lives spent engaged in high-intensity physical work. This job history was then linked to the number of functional limitations reported by respondents as they aged.
Stark differences in physical health by race and ethnicity were already evident by age 60, according to the findings.
“Our understanding of how work really impacts us physically, and how it affects our health later on, is still not completely known at a population level,” says Park. “This study is an attempt to think about work more broadly for the older adult population. I hope that people will really think about the multidimensional facets of work and move beyond a purely economic perspective. What do these jobs require us to do, and what do they expose us to? And is that good or bad?”