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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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The impact of late-life parental death on adult sibling relationships
— do parents' advance directives help or hurt? | | Author(s) | Dmitry Khodyakov, Deborah Carr |
| Journal title | Research on Aging, vol 31, no 5, September 2009 |
| Pages | pp 495-519 |
| Keywords | Siblings ; Family relationships ; Attitude ; Bereavement ; Parents ; Death ; Terminal care ; Rights [elderly] ; Social surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The authors examined whether the effect of parental death on adult siblings' relationship quality varies on the basis of the presence and perceived effectiveness of a deceased parent's formal preparations for end-of-life care. The authors used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, and focused on the relationship quality of a bereaved adult child and his or her randomly selected sibling. Parental death was associated with a decrease in sibling closeness. The parent's use of advance directives (living will and durable power of attorney for health care) did not have uniformly positive effects on siblings' relationship quality. Sibling relationships suffered when the living will was believed to "cause problems"; but relationships improved when the deceased parent named someone other than his or her spouse of a child as durable power of attorney for health care. The authors discuss the implications for developing effective end-of-life preparations that benefit both the decedent and surviving kin. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-100907001 A |
| Classmark | SV: DS:SJ: DP: DW: SR: CW: LV: IKR: 3F: 7T |
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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