Eldercare Policy Implications on the Time Use Patterns and Quality of Life of the Elderly and Elder Caregivers in Europe, UK, US, and Japan

Project Information

AgeingTimeUse

Grant agreement ID: 892101

DOI

10.3030/892101

Project terminated on 28 May 2022

EC signature date 26 March 2020

Start date 1 June 2020

End date 31 May 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 212 933,76

EU contribution

€ 212 933,76

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AgeingTimeUse (Eldercare Policy Implications on the Time Use Patterns and Quality of Life of the Elderly and Elder Caregivers in Europe, UK, US, and Japan)

Reporting period: 2020-06-01 to 2022-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The demographic trends show that in 2050, 25% of the population in Europe, 21% in the US, and almost 40% in Japan will be aged 65 and above. Countries will have to face tough decisions on public spending regarding the development of sustainable strategies for safe, healthy, and dignified ageing. Meanwhile, the increasing burden of family care responsibilities reinforces traditional gender roles within households, jeopardising the already fragile strides toward gender equality. The exacerbation of the demographic trends and increasing burden on public spending will push countries in the industrialised world to adjust the course as new challenges in family care will inevitably arise. Therefore, it is vitally important and timely at this juncture of history to study the daily lives of family caregivers.
The main problem that drove this project was that there was very little comprehensive quantitative research on family caregivers. With this view in mind, the project focused on analysing the time use patterns of family caregivers, elucidating how family caregivers spend their typical days. It also identified the patterns of family caregivers and older adults (objective 1); mapped out demographic factors that affect the formation of these typologies (objective 2); and informed peers and broader audiences by developing a tool (atusxvisualizer.com) for making such analyses more accessible (objective 3).
This research project analyses the time use in one of the most advanced countries in terms of social security for older people, Japan, and the US, where social security in older age is not comparable to that in Europe or East Asia. The project focused on the time use of caregivers. Using sequence analysis and a web application for data visualisation, the project defined the main typologies of time use among family caregivers across weekdays and weekends. These patterns then elucidate the effects of long-term care policy and formal care services, as well as the demographic and resource-based antecedents of why such patterns and typologies arise. The project also analyses the strain on paid and unpaid work among family caregivers.
This project is an interdisciplinary study with outcomes spanning multiple disciplines, such as sociology, gerontology, demography, and computational science. It employed computational methods such as sequence analysis and sequence visualisations. The project uses large datasets such as the American Time Use Study, the Japanese Survey of Time Use and Leisure Activities, and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. A number of publications were produced under this project, with two highlighting the main outcomes of the project (in the Journal of Population Ageing and PLoS One).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project analyzed the time use patterns of caregivers and gender inequality in unpaid work. The results can be summarized as follows:
- identification of the time use patterns of caregivers, particularly highlighting how housework plays an important role in family caregiving;
- characterization and description of the main groups of caregivers and their daily patterns;
- highlighting how time use data plays an important role in our understanding of the daily routines of family caregivers;
- development of sequence analysis protocols to make reproducible research;
- development of international collaborative networks in the area of time use research.

The following outcomes were produced for the academic audiences:
1) tutorial on how diaries can be visualised using Stata (tempograms). this link to OSF preprints.
2) a paper: Kolpashnikova, K. and Kan, M. Y. (2021). Eldercare in Japan: Cluster Analysis of Daily Time-Use Patterns of Elder Caregivers. Journal of Population Ageing, 14(4), 441-463.
3) Population Association of America conference poster presentation.
4) British Sociological Association conference presentation.
5) British Society for Population Studies conference presentations (two).
6) departmental seminar presentation.
7) International Association of Time Use Research conference presentations (two).

The following outcomes were produced for broader audiences of policy makers, journalists, and academics from other fields:
1) a paper: Kolpashnikova, K., Flood, S., Sullivan, O., Sayer, L., Hertog, E., Zhou, M., and Kan, M.-Y. Suh, J., and Gershuny, J. (2021). Exploring daily time-use patterns: ATUS-X data extractor and online diary visualization tool. PLOS One 16(6), e0252843.
2) the atusxvisualizer.com website for making the research reproducible and making time-use visualizations accessible
3) blog posts on kamilakolpashnikova.com detailing the results of the project
4) Tony Trueman of BSA picked up my paper and publicised it online. Here is the link to the article. It was also picked up by the Carer.

Additionally, last year, European Commission, Directorate-General for Research & Innovation launched a new program aimed at helping Horizon 2020 projects with research communication and dissemination called the Horizon Booster. I have joined that program, and now my project is being supported by Trust-IT Services and Francesco Osimanti. We have already completed Module A and now have moved to Module B. The project of Ewa Jarosz (DEXSAGE) will be joining us to create a research dissemination consortium. The results of this collaboration are expected in late 2022.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project contributed a new comprehensive framework for sequence analysis of time use data. Another contribution of the project is the visualisation of time use data for wider audiences. Additionally, the project contributed novel and innovative ways to analyse sequences using high-performance parallel computing in Julia. These methods are more common in genomics sciences but are not yet widely used in ageing and care research. Because the granularity and the size of the combined time use datasets are increasing every year, R (the most common language for sequence analysis) is often unable to cope with the computational requirements of large time use datasets (for example, the Japanese time use dataset, STULA, contains more than 100,000 time-use sequences). So, the development of ways how to do it in Julia in a parallel way helps to 1) use larger datasets and 2) increase the speed of calculations.

Created under the Horizon Booster