# Work Conditions and the Health of Working Parents and their Children

> **NIH NIH R21** · DUKE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $161,000

## Abstract

Project Summary (max 30 lines text)
 Individuals’ work conditions are strongly related to their health. Parents’ work conditions
can also affect the health and development of their children, who are greatly influenced and
constrained by their parents’ lived experiences in the labor market. Work schedules are a
particularly underexplored aspect of work conditions, with the potential to shape worker and
family health. The importance of understanding scheduling’s effects continues to increase as
low-wage employment shifts toward the service sector, with its characteristic variability and
unpredictability in work and pay.
 Prior research has shown that work schedule unpredictability is common among low-
wage workers and that it is associated with worse worker and family well-being. Despite this
emerging body of evidence, however, there remain a number of unknowns. First, although
schedule unpredictability correlates to worse outcomes for workers and families, it is unclear
from the extant literature whether schedule unpredictability causes worse outcomes or whether
the associations merely reflect differences between workers in other characteristics that predict
both schedule unpredictability and worker well-being. Second, while policies regulating work
often connect rhetorically to community-level population health, laws aimed at curbing schedule
unpredictability for low-wage service workers are very new and little is known about the health
effects, intended or unintended, of such legislation.
 The proposed research project will address these gaps in the literature by using an
innovative daily diary methodology to gather daily reports from 1,000 low-wage working parents
about work schedule unpredictability, pay, and worker and family mental health. Daily reports
will be gathered over two one-month periods, once prior to a schedule stability law taking effect
and once after the law is implemented. We utilize a unique daily survey tool that our research
team created and extensively piloted. No other researchers examining work conditions and
family health are utilizing this type of data collection method.
 Because our design combines a daily diary study with the implementation of a policy
change, we can both examine the causal within-family effect of daily unpredictability on worker
and family health and also identify causal effects of regulation that changes work conditions.
Studies of work conditions and worker health typically rely on between-person survey
approaches. Our design effectively utilizes within-person change over time both day-to-day and
between periods to investigate the causal effect of work schedule unpredictability on health.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10113657
- **Project number:** 5R21HD100893-02
- **Recipient organization:** DUKE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Anna Gassman-Pines
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $161,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-02-24 → 2023-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10113657

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10113657, Work Conditions and the Health of Working Parents and their Children (5R21HD100893-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10113657. Licensed CC0.

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