Role Enhancement or Role Strain

Proponents of productive aging claim that occupying productive roles is beneficial to the self and others. The authors use the role enhancement and role strain perspectives to examine the impact of multiple productive roles on the well-being of older caregivers. Using three waves of the America Changing Lives Study, the authors controlled for invariant and time-variant factors to test the effects of occupying multiple productive roles on the three well-being indicators of 270 older caregivers. Older caregivers who worked and/or volunteered reported better self-rated health, supporting the role enhancement hypothesis. No evidence of role strain was found. For caregivers without multiple productive roles, high informal social integration was related with low functional impairment. This study suggests that productive roles may have a positive effect on older caregivers and finds no evidence of any negative effects. The implications of these findings in policy, research, and program development are discussed.