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Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children

Our goal in this paper is to analyse the extent to which completed fertility, and in particular childlessness, is a valid predictor of living alone at advanced ages, an increasingly important residential option in advanced societies with crucial implications for social policy design and the organiza...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Reher, David, Requena, Miguel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5587460/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28936140
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10433-017-0415-6
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author Reher, David
Requena, Miguel
author_facet Reher, David
Requena, Miguel
author_sort Reher, David
collection PubMed
description Our goal in this paper is to analyse the extent to which completed fertility, and in particular childlessness, is a valid predictor of living alone at advanced ages, an increasingly important residential option in advanced societies with crucial implications for social policy design and the organization of welfare services. Based on micro-data from the 2011 Spanish population census, logistic regression techniques are used to assess the impact of fertility on living alone among elderly women net the effect of age, marital status, educational attainment, and other standard population controls. Our results show a clear relationship between completed fertility and living alone. Childlessness is strongly associated with living alone, while having offspring acts as a powerful buffer against living alone, particularly in larger families. A relevant conclusion of this study is that a growing deficit of family resources available for the elderly women will take place in those societies where low fertility and high rates of childlessness have prevailed in recent decades, leading to substantial growth in the number of childless elderly women and in the incidence of living alone during later life.
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spelling pubmed-55874602017-09-21 Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children Reher, David Requena, Miguel Eur J Ageing Original Investigation Our goal in this paper is to analyse the extent to which completed fertility, and in particular childlessness, is a valid predictor of living alone at advanced ages, an increasingly important residential option in advanced societies with crucial implications for social policy design and the organization of welfare services. Based on micro-data from the 2011 Spanish population census, logistic regression techniques are used to assess the impact of fertility on living alone among elderly women net the effect of age, marital status, educational attainment, and other standard population controls. Our results show a clear relationship between completed fertility and living alone. Childlessness is strongly associated with living alone, while having offspring acts as a powerful buffer against living alone, particularly in larger families. A relevant conclusion of this study is that a growing deficit of family resources available for the elderly women will take place in those societies where low fertility and high rates of childlessness have prevailed in recent decades, leading to substantial growth in the number of childless elderly women and in the incidence of living alone during later life. Springer Netherlands 2017-02-17 /pmc/articles/PMC5587460/ /pubmed/28936140 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10433-017-0415-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Original Investigation
Reher, David
Requena, Miguel
Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children
title Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children
title_full Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children
title_fullStr Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children
title_full_unstemmed Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children
title_short Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children
title_sort elderly women living alone in spain: the importance of having children
topic Original Investigation
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5587460/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28936140
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10433-017-0415-6
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