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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| The impact of family members on the self-reported health of older men and women in a rural area of Bangladesh | | Author(s) | Omar Rahman, Jane Menken, Randall Kuhn |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 24, part 6, November 2004 |
| Pages | pp 903-920 |
| Source | http://journals.cambridge.org/ |
| Keywords | Health [elderly] ; Older men ; Older women ; Living with family ; Rural areas ; Bangladesh. |
| Annotation | Does co-residence of spouses and children affect older men's and women's self-reported general health? Using data from the 1996 Matlab Health and Socio-Economic Survey (MHSS), binary logistic regression has been used to explore this interrelationship in a rural area of Bangladesh, paying particular attention to the gender of children and interactions with chronic disease. A sample of 765 women and 979 men aged 60+ with at least one surviving child was available. The main result was that for an older woman, optimum self-reported health is most likely when a spouse and at least one son or daughter are present. Any deviation from this family pattern (either no spouse or children of only one sex) leads to a significant risk of poor self-reported health. On the other hand, for men, there were no differences in self-reported health in the various spouse-child combinations. The relationship between a balanced gender distribution of children and optimum self-reported health in older women may explain the levelling out of fertility at roughly three children per woman, despite the intensive promotion of family planning in the area. Further reductions in fertility (an important policy concern) may depend on improving the substitutability of sons and daughters in the support of their ageing mothers. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-041213004 A |
| Classmark | CC: BC: BD: KA:SJ: RL: 7FD |
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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