Conditional on the Environment? The Contextual Embeddedness of Age, Health, and Socioeconomic Status as Predictors of Remote Work among Older Europeans through the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 era lockdown measures resulted in many workers performing their employment
tasks remotely. While identifying individual-level predictors of COVID-19 era remote work,
scholarship has neglected heterogeneity based on contextual characteristics. Using the first
COVID-19 module (2020) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (N = 8,121)
and multinomial logistic regression analyses, this study examined how country-level digitalization,
stringency of government COVID-19 containment measures, and COVID-19 era excess mortality
moderated how individual-level age, health, education, and income affected working partly or fully
remotely among older Europeans (50-89 years) continuing to work through the pandemic. The
central findings are that higher societal digitalization reduced the positive association between
education and fully remote work, and greater country-level excess mortality accentuated how
more education and poorer health increased the probability of fully remote work. These findings
are interpreted through the fundamental cause theory of health and the health belief model. They
further lead to recommendations that during future epidemics, policies and programs should
address the remote working capabilities of older persons with fewer years of education, with
fewer skills with modern digital technologies, and in worse health, especially within nations that
are less digitally developed and harder hit by the epidemic in question.