Long-term trends in living alone in later life in the United States, 1850-2015

ABSTRACT

Recent research has looked at living alone among the elderly both within the context of the developed world and globally from a comparative perspective. To date this research has contributed relatively little to our understanding of patterns of change over time, an issue of major importance for the prediction of future trends. We propose now to look at change over time using a long-term historical perspective on living alone based on rich data from the United States, the country with by far the longest series of micro-census data in the world. Our analysis will be based on available public use manuscript samples of US censuses beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and stretching until the present. It will yield an invaluable long-term perspective, spanning the entire period of economic development and social change that characterized the history of the USA over the past century and one half. Descriptive indicators of the incidence of living alone are interpreted in terms of important societal, cultural, economic and legislative changes over the period under study. Multivariable analytical techniques are applied to these data in order to assess both the micro determinants of living alone and how independent variables such as age, sex, education and marital status change over time. The results of this study enable us to estimate the degree to which change in the United States can be used as a benchmark for patterns of historical change elsewhere, especially when controlling for levels of development.

KEYWORDS:

• Living alone
• living arrangements
• old age
• census data
• aging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Micro census data – and many other sources for that matter – provide no information whatsoever about exactly where proximate kin live with respect to any given ego. Since this potentially important aspect of solo living is not included in the census‐based meaning of the household as an independent residential entity, we rarely have the chance to empirically test its relevance.

2. According to Statistics Sweden web site (SCB), 59.2 percent of women 65+ lived alone in 2015 in Sweden versus 32.1 percent in the US, and 25.8 percent of Swedish males versus 18.3 percent of American men.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under Grant numbers SO2014-53903-C3-1-R and CSO2014-53903-C3-3-R; Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades under Grant number RTI2018-098455-B-C21; and Comunidad de Madrid under Grant number H2015/HUM3321.