Abstract
BackgroundThere exists a well established link between employment status and health, with unemployment being associated with poorer health. Much less is known about the association between economic inactivity and health, especially among people with disabilities. Our aim is to determine whether the association between employment status and health is similar for adults with and adults without intellectual impairment.MethodsUsing nationally representative data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, we undertook a series of cross sectional analyses of the association between employment status and health (self-reported general health, mental health) among British adults with and without intellectual impairments at ages 26, 30, 34, 38 and 42.ResultsPeople with intellectual disability and borderline intellectual functioning had markedly lower employment rates and poorer health than other participants at all waves of data collection. When compared with participants in full-time employment the prevalence of poorer self rated health and mental health was higher among participants with and without intellectual impairment who were in either part-time employment or were economically inactive at all ages. When compared with participants in employment the prevalence of poorer self rated health and mental health was higher among participants with and without intellectual impairment who were in the economically inactive categories of unemployment, education/training and ill/disabled at all ages. Intellectual disability status appeared to moderate the strength of the relationship between economic activity and self-rated health and, to a much lesser extent, the relationship between economic activity and mental health. In all instances the moderation indicated a stronger association among participants without intellectual impairment.ConclusionsThe results provide substantive evidence to suggest that the nature of the well-established association between employment and better health is similar for British adults with and without intellectual impairments. The results do, however, indicate that the magnitude of the effect involved differed. Further research is needed to identify mechanisms that may underlie this difference.
Highlights
There exists a well established link between employment status and health, with unemployment being associated with poorer health
In this paper we investigate the association between employment status and health among two groups of people with intellectual impairments; people with intellectual disability and people with borderline intellectual functioning
Prevalence of poor health was greater in every analysis across the two health indicators, age and participant groups for economically inactive participants and participants in parttime employment when compared to that of participants in full-time employment
Summary
There exists a well established link between employment status and health, with unemployment being associated with poorer health [1,2,3,4] This association appears to be accounted for by two distinct processes; health selection (healthier people are more likely to gain and retain employment), and specific health benefits associated with employment [1, 3, 5,6,7]. Much less attention has been paid to the health of people who are ‘economically inactive’ or ‘workless’ (i.e., people who are not working for a variety of reasons, including studying or providing care, or are deemed ‘unfit’ for work) [10, 11] This is somewhat paradoxical as in many high income countries the economically inactive population is significantly greater than the unemployed population. The economically inactive group was comprised of: 2.30 million people who were not looking for work because they were studying; 2.21 million people (of which 1.95 million were women) who were not looking for work because they were looking after the family or home; 1.99 million people who were not looking for work because of poor health/disability; and 1.17 million people who were not looking for work because they were retired
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