The household context of unpaid caring in Northern Ireland: an administrative data study of household burden, health and labour market outcomes, and mortality among the NI caring population

Approximately one-in-eight people in Northern Ireland (NI) provide unpaid care. Although many carers report benefits associated with their caring role (Brown & Brown, 2014), robust evidence highlights how caring can be a highly burdensome role which can have detrimental impacts on carers’ labor market participation, family relations, and health outcomes (e.g., Bauer & Sousa-Poza, 2015; Jacobs et al., 2019). The burden faced by carers is only compounded by the difficulties they face in acquiring necessary supports and resources (Carers NI, 2022); one contributing factor to these challenges is the failure of policy and services to recognize the diversity of carers (Fenney et al., 2023).

As a result, it is crucial to start exploring the diversity of the unpaid caring population and one component of diversity that is rarely considered is the household context in which caring occurs. Research, for example, has shown an association between objective caregiver burden and family-role overload (Halinkski et al., 2020), while other factors such as the number of family members needing care (Souza et al., 2017), and the level of support received by the carer (Teahan et al., 2020) also predict carer burden. Notably however, there has been little exploration of how household burden may contribute to negative carer outcomes. Consequently, the current study has four objectives:

(1) Describe the unique context (and changes in the unique context) of informal caring in households in NI.

(2) Develop a novel index of household burden.

(3) Examine the association between carer status and a range of employment, education, and health outcomes in the context of household burden. Determine whether the consequences of caring have changed or remained the same and whether household burden has been improving, worsening, or staying the same from Census 2011 to Census 2021.

(4) Examine the association between carer status in 2011 and mortality incidence in the context of household burden.