Abstract
Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalonia to the Urals during the demographic ancien régime and thereafter. To examine the historical geography of living arrangements among the elderly, the spatial patterns in our data are assessed using formal tools of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis. To investigate the extent to which the observed regional patterns are attributable to underlying demographic, socio-economic, or environmental variability, we specified a series of the OLS regression models and applied the Local Indicators of Spatial Association to the models’ residuals in order to identify the spatial clusters that cannot be explained by the chosen set of predictors. Our findings reveal considerable variability in the living arrangements of the elderly in historic Europe. This variability does not align very neatly with the geographic patterns predicted by earlier historical demographic literature and partly persists even after controlling for contextual factors. Our bottom-line results suggest that when seeking to untangle the dynamics of European family systems, greater spatial awareness is indispensable.
Highlights
During the last 3 decades, there has been a surge of interest in the living arrangements of older people in the past
It uses formal inductive methods of spatial analysis rather than the crude geographic typologies that have heretofore dominated historical studies of family structure. It accounts for the effects of contextual variation across populations by introducing local-level control variables within a multivariate regression framework. These three methodological pillars allow us to probe a number of questions that have rarely been asked before: What does the geography of elderly living arrangements look like when we examine large-scale historical evidence using the formal tools of spatial analysis? Was this geography generated by structural stability over space, or was it conditional on local spatial heterogeneity? Does the spatial patterning revealed in a uniquely broad set of comparative materials reaffirm the received wisdom that the family contexts of the elderly differed between major areas of Europe, and how sensitive is that picture to the effects of potential determinants of co-residence patterns?
In order to check how sensitive the findings presented above are to the contextual effects that could influence the residence patterns of the elderly shown in our data, we specify for each of our focal measures a multiple linear regression model using ordinary least squares (OLS) with the control variables listed above
Summary
During the last 3 decades, there has been a surge of interest in the living arrangements of older people in the past. Starting with the seminal volumes by Laslett and Wall (1972) and Wall and Robin (1983), historians of the European family have juxtaposed the complex household formation system of major Eurasian societies with the north-western European system based on small nuclear families (e.g. Hajnal 1983; Engelen and Wolf 2005; Fauve-Chamoux and Ochiai 2009). Around this mainstream classification based on the morphology of household systems a rigid geographic taxonomy of family systems has been built up that divides Europe into three parts separated by two main boundary lines, splitting north-western Europe from the south and the western from the eastern part of the continent. Family historians were good at documenting local specificities of elderly co-residence patterns, they failed in their efforts to systematically untangle the causes of these patterns and remained oblivious to their potential demographic underpinnings (cf. Wachter et al 1978; Ruggles 1987)
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