Responding to claims that contemporary families had abandoned their elderly members, gerontologists over the past 30 years have provided extensive documentation of intergenerational familial support. These studies have been lodged within conceptual frameworks of the modified extended family, intergenerational solidarity, and, more recently, intergenerational equity. By and large, studies claim to have found extensive levels of support. Closer examination of findings from various studies, however, reveals widely discrepant findings in terms of amounts of help given to and received by older family members. This paper examines the findings from four representative Canadian and American studies spanning four decades. Factors contributing to discrepant findings are identified at both methodological and conceptual levels, and implications for future research are discussed.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: