Week 8: Discussion Questions

Aquilino (1991)

1. In this study, Aquilino examines the effect of childhood family structure on the timing of home-leaving. What are his findings?

2. What are the implications of the timing of home-leaving for children's life course? 

3. He is suggesting several possible mechanisms that may explain the linkage between childhood family structure and the timing of home-leaving. What are these mechanisms? What else can you think of?

4. His results of analyses show the different pattern of effects of family structure on the timing of home-leaving between men and women. What are the reasons of such gender differences? 

5. When examining the impact of stepparent family, he didn't distinguish between stepmother-biological father family and stepfather-biological mother family. Do you think that distinction between these two types of family can make any changes in results of women's timing of home-leaving?

Da Vanzo and Chan (1994)

1. On page 106, the authors conclude that "Apparently only very serious health problems (poor health) increase the likelihood of coresidence for husbands, whereas fair health has this effect for wives, perhaps because even a moderately unhealthy wife cannot perform household tasks efficiently." Taking this phrase it seems that women are 'weaker' than men, however this may be a result of the fact that health status is self-reported. How do you think that differences in self-report by man and woman can affect these results/conclusions?

2. Do you think that the adopted conceptual framework (which includes costs and benefits, preferences and opportunities) is a complete model? How do you relate "opportunities" with demographic constraints? 

3. The authors use education, ethnicity and rural-urban residence as measures of preferences. Do you think that they are measuring preferences or values or norms or...?

4. Income is used as a measure of preference for privacy. Do you think that everywhere people would prefer to buy privacy if they could? How this relates to cultures and norms? How extended families can be approached in this context? Do you think that in countries with a higher prevalence of extended families the higher the economic status (income), the lesser is the occurrence of extended families? How about patriarchal families? How about parental power? 

5. Higher income may also produces a "more desirable" parent's to live with (taking the son and daughter's perspective), how this relates with income as a measure for privacy?

6. On page 110 the authors affirm that "such high rates of parent-child coresidence may explain why old age homes in Malaysia are not used widely". From the article it is not clear the quality and accessibility to these age homes. Besides, the policies described on page 96 show that the Malaysian government strongly encourages family support to elderly. Therefore, do you think that this is a norm or it was a situation generated by government incentives? How could you test it? 

7. Thinking about different contexts, in some countries old-age homes are so expensive that only rich people have access to them. On the other hand, it is also possible to find a situation in which these old age homes are so precarious that family has no alternative rather than provide by itself the necessary support/care. How do you relate norms with these constraints?

8. On page 98, the authors discuss that a greater number of children increases the likelihood of a parent to live with a children (higher availability). The authors also provide an reverse causation: parents who wish to live with a child when they were older may have chosen to have more births for this reason. How this relates to norms? If "coresidence between parents and their adult children is already a norm in Malaysia", why do you think that it is necessary to have many children to reach this?

Goldscheider & Waite (1987)

1. In this study, Goldscheider and Waite examine whether the increase in independent living during young adulthood may have caused some of the delay in marriage. More specifically, they test following hypotheses.

- Living in group quarters would have smaller effects on timing of marriage than other, more independent, living arrangements.

- A longer experience of nonfamily living should have greater effects than a shorter one, but each additional year will have smaller effects than the previous year.

- Experience of nonfamily living early in young adulthood will have the strongest effects on the timing of marriage.

- Nonfamily living would delay both young men's and young women's entry into marriage, but the effects would be stronger for women. 

What are their findings of each hypothesis? What do they find about the relationship between nest-leaving patterns and the transition to marriage for men and women? 

2. How would you interpret the different results of analyses by gender? The authors provide some possible reasons over the DISCUSSION section. Are they convincing to you?

3. The authors created three different measures of independent living: "Everaway" reflecting any experience with nonfamily living, "Hiatus D" measuring years lived in a college dormitory, and "Hiatus O" measuring years away living alone. Do you think their approach to measure the types of independent living is appropriate to examine the effect of living independently on entry into marriage?

Wolf and Soldo (1988)

1. In this article income is analyzed as a 'constraint' on choice. What is your guess about the role played by income? Is income a constraint? Or income is a measure of an inner/intrinsic preference for privacy? Are these synonymous? Is income associated with health status and marital status?

2. The authors draw our attention to the fact that cross-sectional data unable us to analyze the factors that trigger old people to live in different living arrangements. How we could improve the cross-sectional data collections in order to better capture dynamics? 

3. The authors focused in the probability of an older woman to live with her kth child. Based on this decision, they excluded all cases in which an elderly woman lived with more than one child. Do you think that this is reasonable given the authors warning of the use of restrict categories? How to you think that this might have affected their results?

4. How is your opinion about the way in which the authors dealt with non-linearity in age and income? Have you seen the use of a continuous variable used in conjunction with a dummy variable as they did?

5. What is your impression about the unexpected finding that unmarried sons are more likely to share their households with their mothers than daughters? In fact, this is not a common living arrangement (11.2%), but big attention was giving in the article to this finding. 

6. After controlling for number and type of surviving children, black women are not more likely than white women to live either with siblings/parents or children. What is the impact of this finding to the explored interpretation that racial differences are important understanding living arrangements of the elderly? 

7. The authors explore a database of non-institutionalized population over 65 years. Clark (US trends in disability and institutionalization among older blacks and whites. Am J Public Health 1997 Mar;87(3):438-40) shows that blacks have more disabilities and more ADL than whites in all analyzed years (1982, 1984 and 1989), however blacks were less institutionalized than whites in the beginning of the 80s. How the use of non-institutionalized population may have influenced the finding about black and white women? Moreover, if disability is associated with race, should we include and interaction term?