Living Arrangements of Older Persons

During the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in the living arrangements of older persons. The theme has been part of the demography and sociology of the family, but only as an outcome subordinate to the broader issue of household and family organization. It has received new impetus owing to three interrelated factors: first, the rapidity and demographic inevitability of ageing in the developed world and its even more accelerated pace in countries that have experienced recent demographic transitions; secondly, the increasing availability of data and deployment of procedures to extract information from older sources and to analyse new ones; and thirdly, an upsurge of research in the economics of intergenerational transfers, an area that for a long time has been inextricably linked to the explanation of fertility changes but that now, paradoxically, experiences a revival in order to understand the consequences, rather than the causes, of fertility change.