Mental and Social Health Commons^™

Who Cares? Caregiver Well-Being In Europe, Leah Ruppanner, Georgiana Bostean

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

This paper analyzes a multi-national sample comparing self-reported well-being of those who provide dependent care to that of non-caregivers. We pair individual-level data from the 2004 European Social Survey (ESS) for respondents in 22 nations (n=41,000+) with country-level measures of attitudinal support for co-residential familial caregiving (2007 Eurobarometer), old age and family public transfers (OECD Social Expenditures Database, 2014) and economic development (GDP). Using multi-level modeling, we examine the association between country-level co-residential familial attitudes and public spending and individual-level caregiver well-being, comparing effects by gender. We find that: (1) caregiving is differentially associated with well-being for men and women; …