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Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths

We examined family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration as potential patterns of an extreme outcome of a lonely death: bodily remains that remain unclaimed and are left to the state. This paper combines a unique dataset—Los Angeles County's records of unclaimed deaths—with...

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Autores principales: Sohn, Heeju, Timmermans, Stefan, Prickett, Pamela J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7494098/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32936820
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238348
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author Sohn, Heeju
Timmermans, Stefan
Prickett, Pamela J.
author_facet Sohn, Heeju
Timmermans, Stefan
Prickett, Pamela J.
author_sort Sohn, Heeju
collection PubMed
description We examined family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration as potential patterns of an extreme outcome of a lonely death: bodily remains that remain unclaimed and are left to the state. This paper combines a unique dataset—Los Angeles County's records of unclaimed deaths—with the Vital Statistics' Mortality data and the Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine 1) whose remains are more likely to become unclaimed after death and, 2) whether population-level differences and trends in family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration explain the differences in the rates of unclaimed deaths. We employ multivariate Poisson models to estimate relative rates of unclaimed deaths by social and demographic characteristics. We find that increases in never married, divorced/separated, and living without family were positively associated with rates of unclaimed deaths. Unemployment among men and poverty among women was associated with higher unclaimed deaths. Long-distance migration was not associated with more unclaimed bodies.
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spelling pubmed-74940982020-09-24 Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths Sohn, Heeju Timmermans, Stefan Prickett, Pamela J. PLoS One Research Article We examined family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration as potential patterns of an extreme outcome of a lonely death: bodily remains that remain unclaimed and are left to the state. This paper combines a unique dataset—Los Angeles County's records of unclaimed deaths—with the Vital Statistics' Mortality data and the Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine 1) whose remains are more likely to become unclaimed after death and, 2) whether population-level differences and trends in family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration explain the differences in the rates of unclaimed deaths. We employ multivariate Poisson models to estimate relative rates of unclaimed deaths by social and demographic characteristics. We find that increases in never married, divorced/separated, and living without family were positively associated with rates of unclaimed deaths. Unemployment among men and poverty among women was associated with higher unclaimed deaths. Long-distance migration was not associated with more unclaimed bodies. Public Library of Science 2020-09-16 /pmc/articles/PMC7494098/ /pubmed/32936820 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238348 Text en © 2020 Sohn et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Sohn, Heeju
Timmermans, Stefan
Prickett, Pamela J.
Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
title Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
title_full Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
title_fullStr Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
title_full_unstemmed Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
title_short Loneliness in life and in death? Social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
title_sort loneliness in life and in death? social and demographic patterns of unclaimed deaths
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7494098/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32936820
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238348
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