The family life course and physical functioning in older adults: health effects of joint fertility and partnership histories

A long history of empirical work documents associations between different kinds of family statuses (married/non-married; parent/non-parent) and health status. Recently, this work has begun to be recast longitudinally in a life course theoretical framework. In this paper, I aim to build on this work by investigating joint fertility and partnership histories (‘family life course trajectories’) and their association with physical functioning in older age. Multi-channel sequence analysis is used in conjunction with clustering methods to produce a (partly) empirically driven classification of different common ‘bundles’ of family life course experiences across both the fertility and partnership domains. These different family life course trajectory groups are used to predict trajectories of physical functioning in older age, and possible explanations for the observed associations are investigated.