We are pleased to share our new working paper which proposes a Rotating Module to be included in the European Social Survey (ESS) concerning questions on adult care responsibilities within and beyond households, and the effect of these care responsibilities on employment, social, and wellbeing outcomes. The introduction of such a module in the ESS would enhance our ability to produce much needed cross-national evidence on how care responsibilities affect working lives of family members and its ramifications for family resilience as well as their capacity to adapt to changing labour demands. The ESS is a long-standing, representative cross-national European survey which focuses on attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of the population, but also includes sociodemographic information of respondents (such as age, gender, and educational level).
In the Working Paper, the authors dive deeper into the relevance of the proposed module by following the guidelines for the stage 1 application as indicated by ESS. These criteria are the following:
‘Is the proposed topic relevant and timely to academic and policy debates in Europe?’ The working paper argues that the main gap in academic and policy debates concerning whether and how families can cope with care demands and adapt to changing labour markets pertains to adult care and its effect on employment outcomes of family members who provide it.The working paper states that if we want to understand how care responsibilities affect working lives of family members and their capacity to adapt to changing labour demands, we need comparative and high-quality data on adult care provision to family members both within and outside carers’ households and the impact of this type of care on the carers’ employment outcomes.
How will the Module add to our understanding of the topic theoretically and/or empirically?’, the working paper states that this module will map previously unchartered care responsibilities for adults with health-related conditions (living in the same or outside the respondents’ households) and their impact on cares’ ability to combine these care responsibilities with education and employment. An earlier version of the module was fielded in Belgium through The Social Study (TSS), where the findings indicate that current comparative social surveys are missing an important aspect of care by omitting questions on care responsibilities for other people than young children, as well as lacking data regarding people who are cared for outside the respondents’ household, and of young adults who care for family members with health-related issues.
Will the module have wide appeal to academic and non-academic audiences?’ Since the proposed questions focus on adult care provided within and beyond households and its impact on respondents’ employment in combination with the core questions included in the high-quality comparative ESS data, it is convincingly opening new research avenues. In addition, for policymakers, this proposed questionnaire can be essential for systematically monitoring the amount of care family members provide, which can lead to enact and monitor policies that support and sustain family resilience in time of adult care needs. The new data can therefore underpin various European strategies including the European Care Strategy, the EU Gender Equality Strategy, and the European countries’ employment targets, set at 78% of the population aged 20 to 64 who should be in employment by 2030 for EU Member States.
Concerning the fourth criteria on sustainability of the module for the ESS, the module, will be largely relevant for the whole population, except for a small number focusing on employment which are not relevant for most retired respondents. The inclusion of data on adult care would allow to gauge the impact of care responsibilities within and beyond households on income, employment, and well-being of carers, across family types and countries. It would therefore allow to construct a household typology in which family relations are central, which links adult care to the diversity of family structures across countries and for an evaluation of how these families cope with care demands and adapt to changing labour markets, the core research question of the rEUsilience project.
You can read the full paper, including an annex with a set of the proposed questions, here.