Despite the importance of employment for shaping mental health over the life course, little is known about how the mental health benefits of employment change as individuals age through their prime employment and child-rearing years. This study examines the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort ( N = 8,931), following respondents from their late 20s to mid-50s. Results suggest that among women, the aging of children is especially salient for shaping the mental health consequences of employment. Young children diminish the protective effect of mothers' full- and part-time employment, but the salubrious effects of paid work increase as children get older. The benefit of employment for men's mental health also changes over time, but it is the aging of men themselves rather than their children that alters the magnitude of full-time employment's protective effect. Findings suggest the contribution of employment to life course mental health remains tethered to traditional gender roles.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 29 November 2017.
All research outputs
#7,908,188
of 27,452,751 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Health and Social Behavior
#655
of 1,075 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#110,822
of 344,270 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Health and Social Behavior
#6
of 9 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 27,452,751 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 71st percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,075 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 28.8. This one is in the 38th percentile – i.e., 38% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 344,270 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 67% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 9 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than 3 of them.
