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Elder Care, Multiple Role Involvement, and Well-Being Among Middle-Aged Men and Women in Japan

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Abstract

Japan’s population is aging at an unprecedented rate. Combined with the tradition of family responsibility for elder care, this rapid population aging has resulted in middle-aged Japanese people being much more likely today than in past decades to face the responsibility of caring for their elderly parents alongside their other major roles. Using nationally representative Japanese data, this study assessed the individual and combined implications of caregiving and other role involvements for the well-being of middle-aged men and women. Some evidence was found for deleterious psychological consequences of the caregiver role. However, in contrast to expectations, the interaction between the roles of caregiver and worker was positively associated with well-being among both men and women. The results suggest the importance of middle-aged adults being able to keep working when they have to care for their aging parents. Another important finding was significant gender differences in the psychological consequences of holding multiple family- and work-related roles and in combining these with the caregiver role. Further analysis showed that the spousal role was also negatively associated with depressive symptoms and positively associated with satisfaction for men but not for women. Gender differences in the findings appear to reflect the significant gender asymmetry in role experiences in Japan.

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Notes

  1. Although it was not a focus of this study, future investigations should also examine cases of elderly children (65 years and above) taking care of their parents (85 years and above). This kind of case will also become more common as the population continues to age. According to the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions 2010, the typical ages of caregivers to elderly people aged 90 years and above were 60–69 years (53.2 %), 50–59 years (23 %), and 70–79 years (13.9 %) (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2012). Although older caregivers may no longer be working, caregiving itself may be physically demanding for them.

  2. There are some gender differences in living arrangements in old age in Japan. For example, among those aged 80 years and above, the proportion living with their children was 44.1 % for men and 59.2 % for women, the proportion living alone was 12.9 % for men and 25.1 % for women, and the proportion living with a spouse was 40.3 % for men and 11.9 % for women (Cabinet Office, Japan 2011).

  3. The fertility decline also suggests that more elderly people are likely to be childless and to live alone in the future.

  4. See also the proportion of workers working 50 h or more per week in 2011 based on OECD data (Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT) 2014).

  5. The micro data used for this study were from the American time-use surveys analyzed by Aguiar & Hurse (2007) and the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities (STULA), a time-use survey conducted by the Japanese government (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication). The samples used for the analyses were comparable in terms of age (22–65 years) and work status (full-time workers). However, because there was a slight difference in the definition of “full-time workers,” the findings should be interpreted with caution. In Japan, full-time workers were defined as those who said they usually worked more than 35 h a week, whereas in the United States, full-time workers were defined as those who said they usually worked more than 30 h a week. Thus, the average work hours for the United States may have been underestimated (Kuroda 2010).

  6. It is important to maintain continuous employment to keep working as a “standard employee” in Japan. The high proportion of “non-standard employees” among middle-aged women is closely related to a discontinuous work profile typically resulting from quitting work when the first child is born and then starting work again as the children grow older. This discontinuous employment pattern arises under a work environment that assumes workers are male breadwinners, in combination with limited social support for childcare in communities.

  7. The models in Tables 2 and 3 include the interaction terms between independent variables. Therefore, to avoid the risk of multicollinearity, I subtracted 0.5 from the dummy variables—except for the caregiver role—and standardized the other variable (the number of roles) before creating the product variables. The interaction terms aside, all the correlations between independent variables were less than 0.41.

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Acknowledgments

The data used for this analysis—“the National Family Research of Japan 2003 (NFRJ03), the National Family Research Committee of the Japan Society of Family Sociology”—were provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Center for Social Research and Data Archives, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo. This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant numbers 26380781, 26285117, 22243038) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hosei University, 4342 Aihara, Machida, Tokyo, 194-0298, Japan

    Saeko Kikuzawa

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Kikuzawa, S. Elder Care, Multiple Role Involvement, and Well-Being Among Middle-Aged Men and Women in Japan. J Cross Cult Gerontol 30, 423–438 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-015-9273-x

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