Caring for ageing or sick friends or relatives is an increasing demand on the resources of those in middle and older age, particularly as life expectancy increases but years of healthy life does not. 48% of 55 year olds have reported having a caring responsibility for an older relative and 21% of women and 14% of men spend more than 10 hours a week caring for relatives other than their children. This project will seek to better understand who cares, and the potential impact of caring on the health and wellbeing of carers. This project aims to investigate, firstly, how roles and activities across adult life, such as partnership, parenthood and work histories, might lead to having a caring responsibility in mid-life. Secondly, it will explore how members of households share responsibility for caring and working. Finally, the project will assess the consequences of caregiving for health and well-being of carers. All aspects of the project will also investigate whether relationships differ for men and women, and for more and less advantaged people. To address the objectives of the project we will use data from two ESRC-funded sources: the National Child Development Study (NCDS), which is a cohort of people who were born in Great Britain in 1958, more than 9100 of whom have been followed up to age 55 years; and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), which has interviewed the same people, living in about 40,000 households across the UK, every year since 2009. We will use novel and complex statistical techniques to make the most of the data available and to address the aims of our project. The project will have a number of outputs, with which we aim to reach our five key audiences: local and national government, the charitable sector, our academic peers, our user community of carers, and the general public. We will produce four peer reviewed journal articles, give conference presentations, and present our work at seminars and lectures for all audiences. We will prepare briefing notes summarising our findings for non-academic audiences, press release our findings and write posts for relevant online publications. The project has two non-academic partners who have been involved in the development of our plans, will continue their involvement throughout the duration of the project, and will help to ensure that the research undertaken and findings produced are most useful to their user audiences. The partners are Sam Schwab, who is the Commissioning Team Manager for Adult Social Care at the London Borough of Newham, where he is seconded from Department of Health, and Sue Arthur, who is a Policy and Research Manager at Independent Age, a charity which specialises in offering advice to older people and their carers on issues such as accessing benefits and care. We also plan to collaborate with Carers UK, a membership organisation for carers with which we have been in conversation. One of the major objectives of the project is to provide opportunities to strengthen the skills of the research team, and in particular those of our early career researcher Rebecca Lacey. This project will help her to develop her skills in methods of analysis of longitudinal data, including using a new dataset. It will also provide her with her first opportunity to be co-investigator on a grant, a key step in developing an academic career, and will extend her experience of disseminating findings to both academic and policy audiences.