Income is a well-established determinant of health across the life course, influencing morbidity, mortality, and functional aging. Income data provide critical insights into material conditions that underpin health inequality over the life course. Analyses can examine income profiles across population subgroups—by gender, race, nativity, or education—and investigate longitudinal changes that precede or accompany retirement, disability, or health decline.
Measuring Care of Older Adults with IPUMS Data
Paid care work forms the backbone of the U.S. health and social care systems, encompassing a wide range of occupations responsible for delivering clinical care, personal assistance, and preventive services. Despite its central role in population health and economic functioning, paid care work remains challenging to measure systematically. Care jobs are often distributed across diverse settings, span multiple occupational classifications, and involve complex combinations of clinical, relational, and administrative tasks that are not always well captured in traditional labor statistics. As a result, researchers require data infrastructure that links detailed employment information with demographic and contextual characteristics to fully understand the paid care workforce.
IPUMS provides harmonized data from major national surveys that make it possible to study paid care work consistently across time and across data sources. Drawing on datasets such as the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, IPUMS enables researchers to identify paid care workers using detailed occupation and industry codes and to analyze their wages, hours, job stability, and demographic characteristics. By supporting longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses, IPUMS allows researchers to examine employment trends, workforce composition, and inequality within the paid care sector.
Capturing Unpaid Caregiving for Older Adults
Unpaid caregiving for older adults—most often performed by family members or friends—is an essential yet undercounted part of the care economy. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), accessible through IPUMS Time Use, is one of the best tools available for studying unpaid care. ATUS includes 24-hour time diaries from U.S. residents, capturing how they allocate their time across, for example, work, care, leisure, and household activities. Researchers can measure time spent caring for children, adults, or household members with health needs, and distinguish between direct care (such as feeding or assisting with mobility) and supervisory or emotional support.
Understanding how health changes with age and why those changes differ so dramatically across populations requires data that are both large in scale and rich in context. The new Aging and Health Launchpad is designed to support researchers using large-scale data to study topics related to health and aging, from caregiving and workforce participation to healthcare access and cognitive health. The goal is simple but ambitious: to demonstrate how large-scale data can be used to answer pressing questions about aging, health, and inequality across the life course. This initiative blends the Life Course Center’s research specializations with our expertise building and supporting the use of powerful population data resources.
