Our goal over for the upcoming year is to advance our analyses related to comparisons among the United States, UK and other European countries in relation to social integration across the lifecourse. We are particularly interested now in identifying specific policies that may serve to improve integration and continued social participation among older men and women as well as understanding the intergeneration dynamics that are inherent in demographic transitions. We have several aims further refine this general goal.

1. An aging society will need to refine how work and informal caregiving can be balanced to produce optimal population health and maintain national economic productivity. In the first year, we described various situations with regard to intergenerational cohesion, caregiving and family dynamics and mobility and the functional impacts of changing work family dynamics over the last 50 years. In the coming year, we will identify and test the impact of specific policies in the US, UK and Europe that may maintain population health in the face of changing demographics in terms of age and family structure. We propose to continue to rely heavily on the HRS, ELSA and SHARE studies but also start to incorporate larger studies using census or mortality type data.

2. We propose to examine the impact of retirement and retirement policies on social participation and social integration. While there is much research on retirement, most of it is challenged by the selection issues related to who retires at what time and for what reason. We propose to look at this issue in several ways. First, we will examine the changing patterns of social participation in relationship to retirement in the GAZEL study of French Gas and Electricity studies. This study is of interest because selection is minimized in the company in France where retirement is largely a non-discretionary phenomenon. We will then use country specific changes in retirement policies to look at potential impacts on social cohesion and social participation.