Survey explores relationship between caregiving, economic development, and quality of life

A free webinar taking place on Tuesday, February 27 at 2:00 p.m. ET, will introduce a new open-access data set on who provides child, adult, and elderly care and how caregiving affects economic development and quality of life. The North Central Regional Center for Rural Development is hosting the webinar.

The data is based on a first-of-its-kind survey designed to understand caregiving across the life course, including children, adults, and elderly, according to Shoshanah Inwood, Associate Professor of Community, Food, and Economic Development at The Ohio State University and Fellow with the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development (NCRCRD), who led the survey development.

“The survey includes data on why people are being cared for, demographics of caregivers, and types of caregiving,” said Florence Becot, Penn State Associate Professor of Agricultural Safety and Health in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, who helped develop the survey. “It also examines how caregiving impacts an individual’s social and economic wellbeing and mental and physical health, and asks caregivers what types of programs and policies could help them.”  

Inwood and Becot received support from the NCRCRD to develop and implement the 2023 NCRCRD Caregiving Survey in the North Central US Region. The North Central data set includes responses from over 4,000 caregivers from all 12 states in the region. In 2024, the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD) at Penn State and the Southern Rural Development Center (SRDC) at Mississippi State University joined the effort and are currently deploying the same survey in the Northeast and Southern regions, and plan to make the data available as an open-access resource in the Spring.

The NCRCRD survey is part of a larger effort to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration across states, among researchers and Extension. The survey was collaboratively developed by researchers from the NCRCRD, The Ohio State University, the National Farm Medicine Center, Penn State, AARP, University of Minnesota, Purdue University, University of Rhode Island, and South Dakota State University.

“This dataset is exciting for several reasons. It provides seed data that can be leveraged for more in-depth integrated research and Extension collaborations covering a wide range of fields such as social work, public health, early childhood education, geriatrics, sociology, psychology, etc.,” said Becot. “Further, with almost 400 respondents with connections to agriculture, the data provides insights on caregiving along the life course among a sub-population that is older but also experiences higher rates of disabilities due to the dangerous nature of agriculture.”

During the February 27 webinar, Inwood and Becot will introduce the open-access data set, titled “NCR-Stat: Caregiving Across the Life Course Survey,” and will share insights from survey findings to date. In the one-hour webinar, they will discuss:

• Who is being cared for and how caring may differ across the lifespan
• Who is doing the caregiving and what caregiving looks like
• How caregiving impacts individuals social and economic well-being, and their mental and physical health
• What helps caregivers and what resources are needed

Learn more about the NCR-STAT: Caregiving Survey and how to use the data here.

Register for the February 27^th webinar here.