Demography of Aging (1994) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Elderly and Their Kin: Patterns of Availability and Access
5 The Elderly and Their Kin: Patterns of Availability and Access
Pages 146-194
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From page 146... ...
Under the heading "kin availability," we address the observability of kin structures, ranging from the simple-counts of living kin occupying specified relationships to the complexenumerations of individual surviving kin according to type of relationship, with each member of the kin group described by an array of attributes. The second major focus is summarized by the term "access" to kin, which here has two manifestations: either the face-to-face access implied by coresidence, or the less intense or sustained access implied by close spatial proximity The author recognizes a debt to his collaborators on several papers Rebecca Clark, Vicki Freedman, and Beth Soldo whose efforts are reflected throughout this paper.
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From page 147... ...
is thus in part a consequence of patterns of kin availability and is the second major topic addressed in this chapter. The third and final topic addressed is the spatial proximity of elderly and their kin, especially their adult children.
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From page 148... ...
Nevertheless, this chapter adopts a narrowly demographic perspective, limiting its attention to relatives defined with respect to blood or marriage. This perspective reflects a desire to relate kin patterns to underlying demographic processes.
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From page 149... ...
These considerations raise issues of measurement and analysis that have scarcely been addressed in the literature on old-age living arrangements and family support behavior. Demographic Forces Underlying Kin Availability It is evident that the essential demographic forces that determine the size, age structure, and gender mix of a population patterns of birth and death, by age underlie patterns of kin availability as well.
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From page 150... ...
Complexities of these sorts have been addressed by using a variety of demographic models; these models are discussed in more detail below. Empirical Issues Aggregate Measures of Kin Availability Population aging is an aggregate phenomenon, one revealed by a change in the age structure of a population.
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From page 152... ...
Several existing data sources include information on the preferred measure, a count of living children, while some go further, eliciting information on each living child. Even less common are questions pertaining to siblings, grandchildren, and more distant relatives.
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From page 153... ...
used a large (N approximately 13,000) nationally representative household sample, and provided an extensive array of cross-sectional measures of the kin networks of its respondents.4 For adult children 3The questionnaire used by Shanas in 1962 was also administered to samples drawn in Denmark and the United Kingdom; extensive results from the three surveys are reported in Shanas et al.
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From page 154... ...
is a prospective longitudinal study of a cohort of people approaching retirement age, the first interview of which took place in late 1992 (Juster, 19921. The HRS will provide, albeit for a sample restricted to the age range 51-61 in 1992, the most extensive array of information on kin networks for a large, representative household sample in the United States to date.
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From page 155... ...
Selected Results from Microdata lntormation about kin groups containing elderly can be provided by elderly survey respondents who enumerate their living kin, or it can come from nonelderly survey respondents who report the presence of elderly (e.g., parents) in their kin networks.
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From page 156... ...
As mentioned earlier, changes in cohabitation, divorce, remarriage, and childbearing lead to changes in the nature of kin networks, lending prominence to distinctions involving half- and stepsiblings/children/parents.
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From page 157... ...
An additional challenge, already present given available data, but likely to grow in salience with better data on more complex kinship networks, is to develop new ways to summarize and display information about the composition of kin groups. Models for Analyzing Kin Distributions In view of the deficiencies of available data on kinship patterns and the need to project future kin patterns, the development of models of kin networks has been an area of considerable activity among demographers in recent years.
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From page 158... ...
Numerous studies have used the "multistate" life-table methodology to produce marital status life tables, which can be used to study variations in marital status distributions (i.e., the presence of a spouse) among the older population (for examples of this approach, see Bongaarts, 1989; Espenshade, 1983, 1987; Schoen and Nelson, 19741.
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From page 159... ...
has been used to investigate historical living arrangements found in preindustrial England (Wachter et al., 1978) , to project kin patterns of U.S.
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From page 161... ...
Table 5-3 depicts two very different demographic regimes: in the Taiwanese example, more than a fourth of older women have no living children, whereas in the Dutch example less than 5 percent of older women are in this situation. In comparing the under-65 population that does have a living elderly mother, in the Dutch case the modal situation is to be part of a sibship of three (i.e., to share the potential burden of parent care with two siblings)
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From page 162... ...
As in Table 5-4, the correlations shown pertain to living kin and therefore reflect the combined effects of fertility and mortality. There is a fairly consistent pattern of significant positive correlation between numbers of siblings and numbers of children.
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From page 163... ...
THE ELDERLY AND THEIR KIN TABLE 5-4 Selected Empirical Correlations Between Counts of Living Kin, Various Countries Results from Hungarian Microcensus of 1984: Older Women; Children and Grandchildren Mean Number Mean Number Correlation Age Group of Children Grandchildren Coefficient N 163 55-59 1.9307 2.5572 .74317,444 60-64 1.9870 2.9568 .80707,239 65-69 1.9442 3.0685 .82553,725 70-74 1.9007 3.0863 .83375,259 75-79 1.8434 3.0874 .83493,467 80-84 1.8339 3.2100 .80391,957 85-89 1.6773 2.9902 .7859815 90+ 1.6449 3.2757 .7043214 Results from U.S. Supplement on Aging File of 1984: Older Women; Sisters and Daughters Mean Number Mean Number Correlation Age Group of Sisters of Daughters CoefficientN 55-59 60-64 65-69 70-74 75-79 80-84 85-89 90+ 1.7015 1.6394 1.S717 1.4638 1.2357 1.0265 0.8375 0.5460 1.5103 1.3991 1.2398 1.1811 1.1485 1.0609 1.1615 1.3664 .0916 .0246 .0686 .0738 .0825 .0710 .0886 1,262 1,207 2,139 1,805 1,396 839 420 150 Results from the 1985 Canadian General Social Survey: Older Women; Siblings and Children Mean Number Mean Number Correlation Age Group of Siblings of Children Coefficient N 55-59 4.1469 3.2030 .3138 315 60-64 3.6726 3.2887 .3266 311 65-69 3.5634 3.2593 .2407 401 70-74 3.4654 2.8560 .1874 507 75-79 3.3790 2.3742 -.0578 434 80-84 2.6147 2.6742 .0943 362 85+ 1.8872 2.5524 .1663 357 SOURCE: Data from Pullum and Wolf (1991)
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From page 165... ...
LIVING ARRANGEMENTS A major thrust of recent research in the demography of aging has been to document and explain dramatic trends in the size and composition of households containing elderly people. The following sections survey major theoretical and methodological topics, and highlight the large empirical literature on this question.
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From page 166... ...
First, we can suppose that each potential household in the choice set will produce optimal quantities of each of several household goods, with the array of outputs depending on time inputs of each household member and goods inputs. This "productivity" aspect of the determinants of living arrangement choices depends on the technology of household production, summarized in a household production function.
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From page 167... ...
The benefits of economies of scale can take the form of a larger share of personal money income left for discretionary uses, after paying for market inputs to the production of household goods. It is clear that the size and characteristics of one's kin network represent constraints on the set of living arrangement choices facing an elderly person.
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From page 168... ...
Aggregate Data As discussed earlier, microdata containing information on the availability of kin are not widely available. One solution to the problem of data availability is to construct indices of both living arrangements and kin availability by using aggregate data, and several papers have taken this approach.
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From page 169... ...
use U.S. state-level data for 197O, regressing a measure of the proportion of widows 65 and older who live alone on variables representing economic and demographic factors, including as a measure of kin availability a "mother-daughter" ratio constructed as the number of women 65 and older relative to the number of women aged 35-44.
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From page 170... ...
As is amply documented elsewhere, there are technical problems associated with the logistic model that might limit its applicability to the study of elderly living arrangements;9 these technical issues are not, however, addressed here. The most basic approach relates the type of living arrangement to an array of variables including measures of kin availability, possibly classified by type.
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From page 171... ...
Case 1: No Multiple Coresidence If multiple coresidence does not occur in the sample, then a straightforward MNL specification can be used. Let the "dependent" variable Y be an indicator of which child the older parent coresides with, with Y= 0 denoting all "other" living arrangements; the notation for other variables is as defined above.
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From page 172... ...
Case 2: Multiple Coresidence If simultaneous coresidence of elderly parents with two or more children is sufficiently prevalent in a sample, then it may be possible to model the joint distribution of each child's coresidence behavior, and to identify parameters representing interaction effects between and among children's traits in the observed coresidence patterns. Suppose, for example, that there are just two children, to each of whom there corresponds a binary indicator of coresidence with the parents.
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From page 173... ...
A Selective Survey of Findings Based on Microdata The empirical literature on living arrangements of the elderly has grown rapidly in the last several years, so much so that it is impossible to present a comprehensive survey of the literature in these pages. The papers mentioned are all ones in which nationally representative samples were used, multivariate models were estimated, and at least some measure of current kin availability was included.
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From page 174... ...
. The columns labeled "estimated effects of kin" summarize the estimated partial effects of kin availability in these studies, with an "x" indicating that the corresponding variable appears in the analysis without a statistically significant coefficient, while "-" and "+" entries indicate that statistically significant coefficients with the corresponding signs were found in the analysis.
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From page 175... ...
175 o Cal Cal ¢ · _' .~ o Cal ¢ Cd C)
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From page 176... ...
, however, that the differences in probabilities of each living arrangement type differ substantially according to whether or not there are living children. The same approach was used by Tsuya and Martin (1992)
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From page 177... ...
Such analyses have used data provided by elderly respondents and have tended to focus on consequences of variation in the availability of relatives, by type, for living arrangement outcomes. A different type of analysis uses data provided by the child of an elderly person, in which (in all such analyses to date)
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From page 178... ...
An early analysis of living arrangement transitions is presented in Tissue and McCoy (1981) , who used data from a sample of elderly welfare recipients interviewed in 1973 and 1974.
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From page 179... ...
Assessment and Critique of Empirical Literature on Living Arrangements The foregoing review of empirical literature is admittedly selective in its inclusion of papers and makes no attempt to provide a thorough survey of the findings reported in the selected papers. Instead, the intent has been to identify findings that relate to the central issues of this chapter, namely, the consequences of kin availability patterns for choices of living arrangements.
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From page 180... ...
Second, however, it seems clear that the characteristics of individual children strongly influence the observed coresidence outcome. More attention could, and should, be devoted to discovering the influence on living arrangement choices of particular traits of children (as well as of other kin)
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From page 181... ...
In the Canadian equation, variables indicating the inability to prepare meals and to do grocery shopping were significantly associated with a reduced likelihood of living alone. These findings suggest the fruitfulness of a closer examination of associations between specific functional limitations and decisions regarding living arrangements.
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From page 182... ...
Proximity to kin is related to kin availability both in a trivial way kin proximity is impossible without kin availability and, less trivially, through any effects of the size and composition of kin networks on the spatial distribution of kin from the vantage point of an elderly person. Proximity is also related to living arrangements, in the sense that nearby kin can in many respects provide the same benefits as coresident kin.
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From page 183... ...
A final type of health-related move, which may follow the development of major chronic disability, is into an institution (Litwak and Longino, 1987; Longino, 19901. Empirical Research on Parent-Child Proximity As the preceding discussion shows, parent-child proximity is valued (by the parents, at least)
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From page 184... ...
Having a married child who presumably has competing obligations reduces the likelihood of living near at least one child. Parents with never-married children are more likely to live near a child than those without, but this appears to be the result of the relative youthfulness of unmarried children, rather than their marital status, per se.
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From page 185... ...
and the provision of care by adult children to elderly parents (Lee et al., 19931. The preceding discussion suggests that proximity is itself an outcome, one resulting from the combined behavioral choices of parents and their children, and one motivated in part by the desire to facilitate intergenerational contact and/or resource flows.
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From page 186... ...
From a methodological standpoint, existing data could be used to support more complex and detailed representations of the linkages between kin availability (as determinants) and living or proximity outcomes (as consequences)
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From page 187... ...
Angel, and C.L. Himes 1992 Minority group status, health transitions, and community living arrangements among the elderly.
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From page 188... ...
Chan, A., and J DaVanzo 1991 Living Arrangements of Older Malaysians Who Coresides with Their Adult Children?
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From page 189... ...
Grundy, E 1992 The living arrangements of elderly people.
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From page 190... ...
Crimmins, and C Macdonald 1992 Echoes of the Baby Boom and Bust: Recent and Prospective Changes in Intergenerational Living Arrangements of Elderly Widows in the United States.
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From page 191... ...
1990 Living Arrangements and Household Transitions Among Non-Married Older Women. Paper presented at the 1990 meeting of the Population Association of America, Toronto, Canada.
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From page 192... ...
Robinson 1992 Family structure and changes in living arrangements among elderly nonmarried persons. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences 47(6)
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From page 193... ...
Wolf, D.A. 1984 1988 Kin availability and the living arrangements of older women.
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From page 194... ...
Matthews 1990 Kin availability and the living arrangements of older unmarried women: Canada, 1985. Canadian Studies in Population 17:49-70.
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