Ontario social assistance microdata - Presentation
Elizabeth Paterno (Ministry of Community and Social Services, Government of Ontario)
Ontario’s social assistance programs provide income and employment support to single adults and families who are in financial need. Ontario Works provides financial and employment assistance to help people move towards paid employment and independence, while the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) provides financial assistance and employment support to enable people with disabilities and their families to live as independently as possible in their communities. The Ontario social assistance micro-data set consists of de-identified client-level data collected and used for the administration of these two programs. The presentation will provide an overview of this micro-data set that is available for research through a pilot project that the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services and Statistics Canada are jointly conducting.
Marital status life course transitions and well-being in Canada - Video - Presentation
Susan A. McDaniel, Adébiyi Germain Boco, Sara Zella (Lethbridge)
Abstract: We ask here whether being continuously married, compared with the experience of multiple marital statuses over the life course, is related to physical and mental health as Canadians age from mid to later life. Specifically, this study examines the longitudinal effect of time in various marital statuses and numbers of marital status transitions on physical and mental well-being. We rely for the analysis on sixteen years of data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey. The research is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant, Inequality in Mid-Life, Looking Toward the Later Years: A Canada/U.S. Longitudinal Study (Grant no. 410-2010-0814, McDaniel as Principal Investigator). We analyze a sample of individuals aged 45+ having complete data in all nine cycles of the survey. We first use sequence analysis (SA) through optimal matching to visualize marital trajectories over the 1994/95 to 2010/11 period. Then, we employ a group-based trajectory modelling approach to aggregate respondents with similar trajectories of change in marital status. Five main patterns of marital trajectories are identified: stably married, divorced/separated/widowed, and never married, and clusters of respondents who experienced marital status transitions including married to divorced/separated/widowed, and never married to married. Finally, we use generalized estimating equations (GEE) to assess associations between groups and self-rated health as well as psychological distress. Models were adjusted for individuals’ socio-economic and demographic characteristics. In this study, we expect to reveal a complex pattern of marital history effects on changes in physical and mental well-being.