University of Cologne, Graduate Programme GROW "Gerontological Research On Well-Being", Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany.
Soc Sci Med. 2017 Oct;190:67-74. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.08.021. Epub 2017 Aug 19.
The present study aims to identify, whether and how supplementary grandchild care is causally related to grandparents' self-rated health (SRH). Based on longitudinal data drawn from the German Aging Survey (DEAS; 2008-2014), I compare the results of pooled OLS, pooled OLS with lagged dependant variables (POLS-LD), random and fixed effects (RE, FE) panel regression. The results show that there is a positive but small association between supplementary grandchild care and SRH in POLS, POLS-LD, and RE models. However, the fixed effects model shows that the intrapersonal change in grandchild care does not cause a change in grandparents' SRH. The FE findings indicate that supplementary grandchild care in Germany does not have a causal impact on grandparents' SRH, suggesting that models with between-variation components overestimate the influence of grandchild care on grandparents' health because they do not control for unobserved (time-constant) heterogeneity.
本研究旨在确定，补充照料孙辈是否以及如何与祖父母的自我报告健康状况（SRH）存在因果关系。基于德国老龄化调查（DEAS；2008-2014 年）的纵向数据，我比较了普通最小二乘法（OLS）、带有滞后因变量的普通最小二乘法（POLS-LD）、随机效应和固定效应（RE、FE）面板回归的结果。结果表明，在 POLS、POLS-LD 和 RE 模型中，补充照料孙辈与 SRH 之间存在正相关关系，但相关性较小。然而，固定效应模型表明，照料孙辈的个体内变化不会导致祖父母的 SRH 发生变化。FE 结果表明，德国的补充照料孙辈对祖父母的 SRH 没有因果影响，这表明具有跨个体差异组成部分的模型高估了照料孙辈对祖父母健康的影响，因为它们没有控制未观察到的（时间不变）异质性。
