Centre for Policy on Ageing



Using union status or marital status to study the living arrangements of elderly people
Author(s)	Susan De Vos, Luisa Farah Schwartzman
Journal title	Research on Aging, vol 30, no 4, July 2008
Pages	pp 474-487
Keywords	Marital status ; Living patterns ; Comparison ; International.
Annotation	Traditionally, relevant studies have differentiated by marital status and assumed that married people lived together and that unmarried people did not live with partners. However, marital status is a social construct, whereas union status is the residential one, and although marriage is universal, it is different in different places and at different times. The authors use fairly recent census data for people aged 60+ from nine countries around the world to examine how well marital status helps indicate union status. The countries in this international comparative study of people aged 60+ are: the Czech Republic, France and the US in the West; Mexico, Colombia and Brazil in Latin America; Turkey in the Middle East; Kenya in Sub-Saharan Africa; and Vietnam in the Far East. The authors found reason to believe that marital status has been a good indicator of union status in some places at certain times but that this is not always so. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-080911204 A
Classmark	SLM: K7: 48: 72
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.