This study examines loneliness and its correlates—health, residential care, partner status, and network size—over a seven-year period among adults born between 1908 and 1937. The four waves of data are from the Dutch “Living Arrangements and Social Networks of Older Adults” and the “Longitudinal Aging Study of Amsterdam”programs. Data from at least two waves are available for 2,925 respondents. Results show that older adults generally become lonelier as time passes. The increase is greater for the oldest, the partnered, and those with a better functional capacity at baseline. Older adults who lose their partner by death show the greatest increase in loneliness. Not all older adults become more lonely: Improvement in functional capacity and network expansion lead to less loneliness. Entry into residential care does not affect loneliness. The longitudinal design provides new insights into factors that protect against loneliness compared to cross-sectional studies.
Abstract Data from the 1998 survey "Divorce in the Netherlands" (N = 2,223) are used to analyze differences in loneliness among divorced and married men and women. The results indicate that it makes sense to distinguish social from emotional loneliness. This is consistent with the deficit perspective, which posits that the absence of specific types of relationships is associated with specific forms of loneliness. Whereas social loneliness is largely attributable to support network deficits, emotional loneliness is associated with the absence of a partner. In line with the cognitive perspective, the results show that greater insight into loneliness is obtained when discrepancies in relationships are considered. Divorcees who attach great importance to having a partner and people whose marriages are conflict ridden tend to have the highest levels of emotional loneliness. Our study shows that to explain loneliness, one should take not only characteristics of people's relationships into consideration, but also their relationship preferences. The investment hypothesis, which also follows from the cognitive perspective, is not supported by the data. There is no indication that those who attach greater importance to having a partner invest less in relationships with friends, relatives, and colleagues and therefore show high levels of social loneliness. Consistent gender differences are observed: Men, regardless of partner status, tend to attach greater importance to having a partner than do women, and they tend to have smaller support networks and higher levels of social loneliness. Among the divorced, men are more apt to suffer from emotional loneliness than are women. Notes 1We do not have the data needed to test this assumption. During the interviews held for the 1998 survey "Divorce in the Netherlands," from which we drew information for this article, respondents were not asked questions about preferences regarding a wider circle of relationships. aControlled for emotional loneliness. bControlled for social loneliness. aControlled for emotional loneliness. bControlled for social loneliness. aControlled for emotional loneliness. bControlled for social loneliness. 2We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this idea. 3We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this alternative model.
Continuity and change in intergenerational family relationships: An examination of shifts in relationship type over a three-year period.This paper focuses on shifts in adult child-parent relationship type using the first two waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS). The analyses are informed by both a life transitions perspective, and the negotiation of relationships perspective. The intergenerational relationships typology represents different combinations of solidaristic acts and conflict. We employed Latent Transition Analysis to determine the prevalence and predictors of shifts. Less than 5% of the dyads shifted to a different type. Insofar shifts took place, they were most likely from the ambivalent type, and particularly so for relationships with mothers and daughters. Offspring (re)partnering, offspring divorce, parental widowhood, parental health decline, offspring unemployment, birth of a grandchild, and moving nearer, did not predict typology shifts, whereas the number of parental divorces was too small for analyses of change. Parental repartnering prompted a shift towards the discordant type with its low probabilities of contact and support exchange, and the relatively high likelihood of conflict over personal issues. Moving away prompted a shift from the ambivalent type with its high probabilities of supportive exchanges and conflict over material and personal issues. Over a period of three years, there is considerably more continuity in adult child-parent relationships than change.
The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course and exposing social inequalities in societies around the world. We draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic's effects on individuals, families, and populations, including how social inequalities shape and result from pandemic experiences. We explore the pandemic's implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic's social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic's short- and long-term consequences unfold.
ABSTRACT There is considerable debate about the effects of today's family structures on support arrangements for older people. Using representative data from The Netherlands, the study reported in this paper investigates which socio-demographic characteristics of adult children and their elderly parents, and which motivations of the adult children, correlate with children giving practical and social support to their parents. The findings indicate that the strongest socio-demographic correlates of a higher likelihood of giving support were: having few siblings, having a widowed parent without a new partner and, for practical support, a short geographical distance between the parent's and child's homes. Single mothers were more likely to receive support than mothers with partners, irrespective of whether their situation followed divorce or widowhood. Widowed fathers also received more support, but only with housework. A good parent-child relationship was the most important motivator for giving support, whereas subscribing to filial obligation norms was a much weaker motivator, especially for social support. Insofar as demographic and cultural changes in family structures predict a lower likelihood of support from children to elderly parents, this applies to practical support, and derives mainly from increased geographical separation distances and from the growing trend for parents to take new partners. Social support is unlikely to be affected by these changes if parents and children maintain good relationships.
