How important are carer tasks in determining carer quality of life? Evidence from a Shapley decomposition approach

Candon, D, Hewitt, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7036-3451, Liu-Smith, Y-L and Murphy, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8459-4448, 2025. How important are carer tasks in determining carer quality of life? Evidence from a Shapley decomposition approach. Social Indicators Research. ISSN 0303-8300

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Abstract

While there is a large literature that examines the determinants of carer quality of life, there is a dearth of research that focuses on the usual activities that carers perform and how they are related to carer-specific measures of quality of life. We use data from the Survey of Adult Carers in England to investigate the role that the tasks that carers perform play in determining carer quality of life. We model the relationship between the variables through a series of simple linear regressions, multiple linear regressions, and a Shapley decomposition. We find that all of the individual tasks that we have information on are statistically significant predictors of carer quality of life. In addition, the Shapley decomposition shows that, when taken together, carer tasks explain a higher proportion of variance in carer quality of life than any other group of determinants. These results are largely robust to different measures of carer tasks, different measures of carer quality of life, and different subgroups. We also find that there is evidence of a causal link between carer tasks and carer quality of life as carers report that their caring responsibilities have affected tangible health outcomes such as illnesses and GP visits. From a policy perspective, local government services that are used to support carers should know that policies designed to help carers with their tasks could have a large impact on carer quality of life.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Social Indicators Research
Creators:	Candon, D., Hewitt, M., Liu-Smith, Y.-L. and Murphy, P.
Publisher:	Springer Verlag
Date:	27 January 2025
ISSN:	0303-8300
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s11205-025-03520-1 DOI 2365266 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	03 Feb 2025 10:14
Last Modified:	03 Feb 2025 10:14
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/52956

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