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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Age segregation in later life
— an examination of personal networks | | Author(s) | Peter Uhlenberg, Jenny De Jong Gierveld |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 24, part 1, January 2004 |
| Pages | pp 5-28 |
| Source | http://journals.cambridge.org/ |
| Keywords | Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; Personal relationships ; Integration ; Isolation ; Social contacts ; Social interaction ; Social surveys ; Netherlands. |
| Annotation | Older people who lack regular contact with younger people are at risk of being excluded from contemporary social developments. The authors use data from the Dutch NESTOR - Living Arrangements and Social Networks Survey (LSN) of 1992 to determine the number of younger adults that people aged 55-89 identify as members of their social networks, and to examine those factors associated with segregation or integration. The findings show that there is a large deficit of young adults in older people's networks; and few older people have regular contact with younger non-kin. If age were not a factor in the selection of network members, one would expect the age distribution of adult network members to be the same as the age distribution of the entire adult population. However, the ratio of actual to expected non-kin network members aged under 35 for those aged 65-74 is only 0.10; and only 15% of the population aged 80+ has weekly contact with any non-kin aged under 65. Because most younger network members are adult children, there is also a greater likelihood of younger children also being present. Further, participating in work and volunteer settings that include people of diverse ages increases the likelihood of an older person having significant cross-age interactions with non-kin. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-040205202 A |
| Classmark | BB: SD6: DS: TO: TP: TOA: TMA: 3F: 76H |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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