Living arrangements and family support of older people

This study investigates the availability of children as intergenerational care givers for elderly parents. Children are the elderly’s main resources and care givers due to increasing number and proportion of ageing population with insufficient social welfare in Thailand. However, an evidence of intergenerational support within families is barely found, while the declining potential support ratio indicating the vulnerable social support of tax system was reported. This study, therefore, analyzed longitudinal data collected in a rural area in the northeastern Thailand to show the availability of children living with their parents in the village by comparing between two generations. Matrix operation through kinship network was deployed to find the relationship between female elderly parents and their children. In addition, multivariate regression was used to predict factors affecting the availability of children living in the village. A result revealed that, in 2000, the percentage of women with son living in the village was not different between women in generation 1 and 2, but the percentage of the generation-2 women with daughter dramatically dropped about 18 percent. Most existing children in the village are in school age or work in the agricultural sector, which has the highest rate of out-migration from this region.

This paper aims at analyzing the Chinese urban elders' demand for old-age economic support as well as its influential factors, by using the data from the Survey of Urban and Rural Elderly Population in China 2006. The survey result reveals that most of the urban elders (38%) depend mainly on children support, the second most of the elders (33%) choose "joining the social pension".

The multi-factor analysis result shows elders demand for old-age economic support is greatly affected by "whether the elder have social pension". Besides, other main effects on the demand relate to their income level, children's income level, number of children, filial piety of the children, who makes financial decision of the family, and whether the children give money to their old parents. However, sex and martial status of the elders are not significant to explain their economic support demand in the Logistic regression model. According to the demographic trend of China, this paper believes the proportion of the urban elders who depend mainly on family support will continuously decrease.

【key words】ageing of population, economic support, regional factors

Background: After German reunification mortality among older East Germans converged quickly to the West German level. Simultaneously, they witnessed an 10-fold rise in pension benefits.

Objective: By using this natural experiment, we seek to show, first, that increasing financial transfers from the elderly to their children led to increasing reverse transfers in form of care and, second, that this rise in hours spent for care led to a reduction in old age mortality.

Method: We use poisson regression to test whether rising pensions led to an increase of hours spend on care and if this increase led to a reduction in old age mortality. We use data from the German Pension Fund and data on time use from the NTA project.

Preliminary Results: Our first results reveal that since German reunification intergenerational downward transfers more than doubled. This is caused by the immense increase in pension benefits since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, mortality for pensioners dropped markedly and converged to the West German level.

Regional differences in dependency ratios are often referred to as a potential problem in aging societies. The need for formal care is potentially higher if the informal care is scarce, and in regions where few elderly have a local family network, pressure increases on support from public sector. Geographical distance between family members is the result of accumulated migration and non-migration in all generations in different phases of life, resulting in staying close, moving away or moving closer to family members. The focus of this study is the regional differences in proximity between family members and the demographic processes that produce geographic variation in elderly people’s access to local family networks. The study is based on a quantitative analysis of register data and utilizes the unique opportunity that is available in the Swedish population registers to link individuals to their family networks, place of residence and workplace.

Living arrangements are changing rapidly in China due to the increasing urbanization of the population, the replacement of hutong (courtyard) housing stock with high rise apartments in urban areas, and massive rural-to-urban migration. The result is that it is increasingly unlikely that elderly parents live with their adult children. On the other hand, many urban parents send their children to live with the grandparents, resulting in a new form of multiple generation family, known in China as a “generation-skipping” family. We study the living arrangements and consequences for emotional well-being of the elderly using data from a national probability sample survey conducted in 2010, the Chinese Family Panel Study (14,960 households were included and every family member age 10 and over was interviewed, with information for younger children provided by parents or other adult family members). This sample includes 7,040 people age 60+; this is the group we will study.

The elderly share of China’s population is projected to grow well beyond the capacity of the nation’s social security system. Meanwhile, family care is being challenged by a decline in fertility and an increase in migration from rural to urban areas. This paper examines the short-, mid-, and long-term effects of family support on elderly well-being in rural China, using four-wave panel data on 1,456 persons aged 60 and above in the Chaohu region of China. Findings showed that compared with living alone, being coresident with others lowered the mortality risk of several chronic diseases; but being coresident with adult children increased the mortality risk of cardiovascular diseases, though it was associated with a higher quality of life in the short and middle term. Children’s educational attainment and financial support increased the quality of life except for an increased risk of new incidence of cardiovascular disease in the middle term.

Abstract
South Sumatera Province in Culture toward Aging Population
The study is to analyze how the aging carrying live in Province of South Sumatera. There are several factors of culture having influence toward issues about aging population over there. Increasing in world ageing population is the same happened in this province. Five thousands of 7.5 thousands from the total population in South Sumatera, or fourteen and half percent of population are aging. This big number of aging seems being problem. In fact the effect of culture causes the aging being not having problem. The culture had been given much chance for this age to have peaceful life and carrying rest of their life whatever they have pensioned or not. Generally, in South Sumatera culture in their house is holding relative family perspective. In a household there is living parent, kids, grand parent, and sometimes brother and sister. They are enjoying living togetherness. The hierarchy of the family member is respectful especially for the elderly one. From the culture perspective covers several factors; those are norms, respect, relatives’ family, prestige, religion, protection, mutual benefits, caring children, not burden, helpful, compulsory.
Key words: aging, culture, cultural perspective, relative family, mutual benefit ,religion, caring,

This study presents a new vision for the welfare of the elderly in the Korean society through a novel alternative solution to the problems of the old family supported welfare system for the elderly based on the traditional concept of the filial piety, being surfaced in the face of the changing life style of the people in today’s industrialized, urban Korean society.
This is also to provide the basic arguments necessary to create in the long run an innovative model for a new elderly welfare system cooperatively operated by the combined resources of the family, the business, the state, and the local society, overcoming the limitation of the old family based support of the elderly still prevalent in Korea today.
The present study thus is an inquiry into a fresh alternative approach to the problem of producing a promising alternative elderly support system in Korea through a creative alliance of the family, the business, the government, and the local society utilizing their available resources.

gamma-Gompertz frailty models indicate the heterogeneity of mortality both in male and female at advanced age in China; while female have a larger individual heterogeneity. In general, male show higher mixture mortality than female from 80 to 115 years old, however, female mortality starts to exceed male since about 96 years old controlling for their heterogeneity respectively. The married mostly elderly in male tend to have lower hazard rate by 32% compared to those without spouses. Proximity to children of male oldest of the old has a positive relationship with mortality only after controlling the health behaviors and condition variables, as the direct and indirect effect of proximity to children on mortality can be decomposed. Neither of the two family support factors affects the hazard rate in female. The gender differentials of dependence on spouses and children in term of social connections and support, selective effect of living arrangement related to health condition, role expectancy as well as health behaviors may together contribute to the above phenomenon.

Comparison of Living Arrangements and Family Support for the Urban Elderly
in Incheon-Gyeonggi, Korea and Shandong, China

Abstract

Ik Ki Kim (Dongguk University)
ikki@dongguk.edu


This study tries to compare the differences of the living arrangements of the elderly and thus show the different patterns of the family support for the elderly in Korea and China. China has a huge population with diverse characteristics, while Korea is a small country with homogeneity. For a more sophisticated analysis, this study selects the urban elderly of Incheon-Gyeonggi Province in Korea and Shandong Province in China.

This study is based on analysis of the data from the same questionnaire for the elderly in Chinese and Korean cities. Korean data (2,010) for the Incheon-Gyeonggi Province were collected in Incheon Special city and 17 cities in Gyeonggi Province. This study employs frequency distribution, cross-tabulation and logistic regression analysis for the statistical analysis.