An Empirical Study of the Frequency of Intergenerational Contacts of Family Members in Japan

Abstract

This study aims to examine factors affecting frequency of children's contact with their grandparents. We employed quantitative data collected in Japan in 1999. Results showed that children living near grandparents tended to contact grandparents more frequently than others. Moreover, we noticed importance of parental roles. We found that children whose parents frequently contact grandparents are more likely to contact grandparents than others. There were some different roles of fathers and mothers. It mattered how much time fathers spent at home, while it made a difference whether mothers had jobs.

KEYWORDS:

• socio-demographic predictors
• parental roles
• gender differences
• electronic communication devices
• intergenerational contact
• grandparents/grandchildren

Notes

1. According to 1999 statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (gathered from a survey conducted with 3,000 children), over 80% of children of elementary school age and over 60% of children of middle school age indicated their preference for more contact with old people (Kanekura, 1999). According to statistics provided by Life Design Laboratory (from a survey of 600 grandparents), as many as 75% of grandparents expressed a desire to have more chances to spend time with their grandchildren (Kitamura, 1999).

2. The data for this secondary analysis, “Data of Contemporary Nuclear Families” (Gendai kaku kazoku de-ta), the Institute for Research on Household Economics, was provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Information Center for Social Science Research on Japan, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo. This study deals with intergenerational contacts only within families.

3. In this study, hereafter, to avoid the confusion of terminology, we refer to grandchildren as “grandchildren” or “children,” grandparents as “grandparents” or “grandfathers/grandmothers,” and parents, as, mainly, “parents” or “fathers/mothers.”

4. In cases where there were more than two children in a family, the oldest child was selected.

5. The variable includes indirect contact via media as well as direct contact because the questionnaires were asked in such a way. Also, to tell in advance, the analyses in this study do not show many differences in the results between OLS and logistic regression models. The reason why this dichotomous variable is divided at that point (“over once a month”) is to maintain consistency with other studies (e.g., Naoi, 2001, p. 87).

6. It may be possible that the importance of parental roles varies by the age of the children. We, therefore, inserted an interaction term between “parents' contact” and “children's ages” into both OLS and logistic regression models. However, the results were not very different from our earlier analyses shown in Tables 5 through 7.

7. However, there is an empirical report showing that if the health status of grandparents is very bad and they live alone, parents tend to provide them with nonfinancial support (Kim, 2001).