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Title: Direct and Indirect Pathways to the Long-Term Health, Mental Health, and Work-Related Outcomes for Mothers of Children With Chronic Illness
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Garbarski, Dana Witt, Whitney |
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Direct and Indirect Pathways to the Long-Term Health, Mental Health, and Work-Related Outcomes for Mothers of Children With Chronic Illness Presented: Detroit, MI, Population Association of America Meetings, April-May 2009. Also: http://paa2009.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=91176 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Body Mass Index (BMI); CESD (Depression Scale); Child Health; Depression (see also CESD); Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Mothers, Health Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Investigating the determinants and consequences of various health and well-being statuses is a complex, multidisciplinary venture. Research has focused on a complex web of these determinants and consequences, such as the relation of individuals' socioeconomic status (SES) and health over the life course (Adler et al, 1994; Link and Phelan, 1995; House and Williams, 2000; Lynch, 2003; Palloni, 2006; Herd et al, 2007; Warren and Hernandez, 2007). Families are also an important component for investigating the determinants and consequences of one's health and well-being, with researchers investigating the relation of parents' health, well-being, and SES to child health, well-being, and SES (Elo and Preston, 1992; Conley and Bennett, 2000; Finch, 2003; Hayward and Gorman, 2004). One facet of this complex of relationships that has received less attention at the population level is how child health and well-being may affect parent's health, well-being, and even SES. We seek to determine the impact of caring for a chronically-ill child on the family, relative to caring for a healthy child. Because caring for a child with a chronic health illness can place physical, financial, time, and psychological burdens on the rest of the family, we expect that caring for a child with a chronic health condition may present an additional risk for parental health, mental health, and work-related outcomes beyond caring for a healthy child. We also expect that the worse health outcomes are due in part to the increased effect of family burdens on parental health outcomes, as children's health conditions have been shown to have a negative effect on parental role functioning that is further predictive of parental problems of psychological well-being (Waddington and Busch-Rossnagel, 1992). In particular, we propose to set up a multiple-group structural equation model (SEM), where the two groups being compared are mothers with children that have chronic health conditions and mothers with children that do not have these conditions. The multiple group SEM will allow us to investigate the extent to which having a child with chronic health conditions exacerbates or mitigates some of the relations among mothers' background and family characteristics with mother's health, mental health, and socioeconomic outcomes (see Figure 1 for conceptual model. Note that each variable listed in each category is its own latent construct, and will covary with the other latent constructs listed in that category as well as have direct effects on the latent constructs in other categories). About 13% of our proposed sample (see below) reports that they are caring for a child with a chronic health issue, and a recent study estimates that 15.6% of parents reported that they are caring for a child with an activity limitation, and (Witt et al, under review, 2008). We argue that a child's health is one component of parents' health and socioeconomic outcomes, and thus may be another small but "nonignorable" component of the feedback processes determining intergenerational mobility and the relations among SES and health for individuals and family systems across the lifecourse (Palloni, 2006). |
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Bibliography Citation
Garbarski, Dana and Whitney Witt. "Direct and Indirect Pathways to the Long-Term Health, Mental Health, and Work-Related Outcomes for Mothers of Children With Chronic Illness." Presented: Detroit, MI, Population Association of America Meetings, April-May 2009. |