nach oben

Demography

Erschienen in:

01.10.2013

Living Arrangements and the Elderly: An Analysis of Old-Age Mortality by Household Structure in Casalguidi, 1819–1859

verfasst von: Matteo Manfredini, Marco Breschi

Erschienen in: Demography | Ausgabe 5/2013

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

The elevated levels of protection, assistance, and care enjoyed by the elderly living in complex households has long been a key assumption of many family system theories. However, although this hypothesis has been demonstrated for contemporary contexts, quantitative evidence for past populations is particularly scarce, if not nonexistent. This article investigates the relationship between old-age mortality and living arrangements in a mid–nineteenth century Tuscan population, where the joint family system of sharecroppers coexisted alongside the nuclear system of day laborers. Our findings demonstrate that within complex households, the complexity of relationships, gender inequalities, and possible competition for care and resources among the most vulnerable household members—namely, the elderly and the young—weakens the assumption that the elderly benefitted from lower rates of old-age mortality.

Vorheriger Artikel Mortality Increase in Late-Middle and Early-Old Age: Heterogeneity in Death Processes as a New Explanation

Nächster Artikel Perturbation Analysis of Indices of Lifespan Variability

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

In many preindustrial Tuscan towns, such as Florence and Pistoia, various hospitals, convents, and charitable institutions operated to assist poor people (in particular, the elderly) by providing them with temporary lodging and some rudimentary forms of medical treatments (Floria and Pagliai 2007). Some institutions also distributed food and clothing (Vannucchi 2002).

Some doubts have been cast on the validity of Laslett’s hypothesis for Italy. See Benigno (1989), Barbagli (1991), and Viazzo (2003).

In the same volume, Oris and Ochiai (2002) stressed the same point, although they cast also some doubts over the “superiority” of complex family systems over nuclear ones.

In this article, we adopt a simplified Laslett classification of family forms. A nuclear household is formed by the conjugal unit only; the extended household, by the conjugal unit plus one or more kin members; and the multiple household, by two or more conjugal units. Unless differently specified, one-parent households are counted among the nuclear households. Stem and joint families are particular forms of multiple households in which the parental couple coresides, respectively, with one or more conjugal units (usually married sons). Complex households comprise both extended and multiple households along with frereches, a peculiar family form characterized by the coresidence of two or more married siblings.

These authors support the idea that such an increase in the age at marriage was the reaction of sharecropping households to population growth. In fact, sharecroppers adopted a sort of preventive Malthusian check (late access to marriage and higher permanent celibacy rates) in order to limit increases in household size.

The concept of female honor is frequently seen as one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Mediterranean societies (Viazzo 2003).

This criterion has permitted to identify 329 emigrants aged 60 or older. The possibility of a misclassification of death as emigration is certainly present, but it is lessened by some characteristics of these hypothetical migrants. First, the majority of them (60 %) emigrated with the entire family group, which makes improbable the possibility of a multiple underregistration of deaths. Second, the rest of emigrants were prevalently females (111 vs. 52 males), which fits with the cultural model and economic structure of Casalguidi.

We chose the threshold age of 60 to identify the elderly because people aged 60 or older, having married at about age 27–28, have children who are, for the most part, adult and married and therefore “usually have some choice about where to live” (Ruggles 2009:268).

This analysis considers married couples as single observations given that they live in the same household (Gruber and Szoltysek 2012; Ruggles 2009)

It is important to remember that an absence of sons was of major concern to the sharecropping family because only men could sign the contract renewal. In the event of their absence, these families ran the risk of losing the farm and facing downward social mobility (Papa 1985).

Models were estimated using robust standard errors. Standard errors were adjusted to allow for intragroup correlation, relaxing the usual requirements of independence of observations. In this case, individual observations are clustered at the household level when two or more elderly individuals live in the same family group. As for servants and clerics, we found (and excluded) 15 individuals.

Actually, a very simple model estimating the risk of mortality for solitaries was estimated. The results do not show any differential risk with respect to elderly people living in nuclear households. The pattern is quite similar to that of one-parent households (see upcoming comments).

As many as 15 of the 93 widows (16.1 %) living in one-parent households died, and 11 (11.8 %) remained in the same situation; 23 (24.7 %) emigrated, and 44 (47.3 %) experienced a change in living arrangements.

This index uses a scale weighting the producer and consumer potential of each household member according to gender and age. The ratio varies theoretically between 0 and 1. Low values indicate a strong prevalence of consumers over producers, and high values point at households where producers fulfill consumer demand for resources.

The low and high consumer/producer index categories were determined as the lower and upper 10th percentile, respectively. The reference (and average) category for the sex ratio was determined as the interval between 0.75 and 1.25, which corresponds to households in which the number of females is ±25 % the number of males. Households with a greater or lower ratio of females were classified as having a gender imbalance.

Alter, G. (1996). The European marriage pattern as solution and problem: Households of the elderly in Verviers, Belgium, 1831. History of the Family, 1, 123–138.CrossRef

Alter, G., Dribe, M., & Van Poppel, F. (2007). Widowhood, family size, and post-reproductive mortality: A comparative analysis of three populations in nineteenth century Europe. Demography, 44, 785–806.CrossRef

Alter, G., Neven, M., & Oris, M. (2000). Individuals, households and communities facing economic stresses: A comparison of two rural areas in 19th century Belgium. In M. Neven & C. Capron (Eds.), Family structures demography and population. A comparison of societies in Asia and Europe (pp. 185–210). Liège, Belgium: Laboratoire de Démographie de l’Université de Liège.

Barbagli, M. (1991). Three household formation systems in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Italy. In D. I. Kertzer & R. P. Saller (Eds.), The family in Italy from antiquity to the present (pp. 250–270). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Barbagli, M. (2000). Sotto lo stesso tetto. Mutamenti della famiglia dal XV al XX secolo [Under the same roof. Changes in the family in Italy from the fifteenth to the twentieth century]. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino.

Benigno, F. (1989). The Southern Italian family in the early modern period: A discussion of co-residential patterns. Continuity and Change, 4, 165–194.CrossRef

Berkner, L. (1975). The use and misuse of census data for the historical analysis of family structure. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5, 721–738.CrossRef

Biagioli, G. (1975). L’agricoltura e la popolazione toscana all’inizio dell’Ottocento. Un’indagine sul catasto particellare [Tuscan agriculture and population at the beginning of the nineteenth century: A survey on the parcelled cadastre]. Pisa, Italy: Pacini Editore.

Biagioli, G. (1986). La diffusione della mezzadria nell’Italia centrale: Un modello di sviluppo demografico ed economico [The diffusion of sharecropping in Central Italy: A model of demographic and economic development]. Bollettino di Demografia Storica, 3, 59–66.

Breschi, M., Derosas, R., Lagazio, C., & Manfredini, M. (1999). L’influenza del contesto familiare sulla sopravvivenza dei bambini. Risultati di indagini microdemografiche sull’Italia dell’Ottocento [The role of the family on the survival of children. Results of microdemographic studies from nineteenth century Italy]. Bollettino di Demografia Storica, 30(31), 187–212.

Breschi, M., Fornasin, A., Gonano, G., Manfredini, M., & Seghieri, C. (2010). Demographic responses to short-economic stress in a 19th-century Tuscan population. In S. Kurosu, T. Bengtsson, & C. Campbell (Eds.), Demographic responses to economic and environmental crises. Proceedings of the IUSSP Seminar (pp. 48–64). Kashiwa, Japan: Reitaku University.

Breschi, M., Manfredini, M., & Pozzi, L. (2004). Mortality in the first years of life: Socio-economic determinants in an Italian nineteenth-century population. In M. Breschi & L. Pozzi (Eds.), The determinants of infant and childhood mortality in Europe during the last two centuries (pp. 123–138). Udine, Italy: Forum.

Burgess, E. W. (1916). The function of socialization in social evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Campbell, C., & Lee, J. Z. (1996). A death in the family: Household structure and mortality in rural Liaoning: Life-event and time-series analysis, 1792–1867. History of the Family, 1, 297–328.CrossRef

Cavallo, S. (1998). Family obligations and inequalities in access to care in northern Italy, seventeenth to eighteenth century. In P. Horden & R. Smith (Eds.), The locus of care. Families, communities, institutions, and the provision of welfare since antiquity (pp. 90–110). London, UK: Routledge.CrossRef

Chayanov, A. V. (1989). The peasant economy: Collected works. Moscow, Russia: Ekonomika.

Chiti, M. (1988). Casalguidi nel tempo. Piccola storia di un mondo scomparso con testimonianze di vita vissuta dai protagonisti [Casalguidi over time. History of a lost world with testimonies of life experiences]. Pistoia, Italy: Tipografica Pistoiese.

Christakis, N. A., & Allison, P. D. (2009). Inter-spousal mortality effects: Caregiver burden across the spectrum of disabling disease. In D. M. Cutler & D. A. Wise (Eds.), Health at older ages: The causes and consequences of declining disability among the elderly (pp. 445–477). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cioni, E., Meini, M. C., Pescarolo, A., & Tronu, P. (1997). Famiglie in mutamento Forme di convivenza e corsi di vita in Toscana 1971–1991 [Changing families. Forms of coresidence and life histories in Tuscany 1971–1991]. Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli.

Contrucci, P. (1839). Quadro geografico-statistico del compartimento pistoiese [Geographical and statistical outline of the department of Pistoia]. Pistoia, Italy: Tipografia Cino.

Das Gupta, M. (1999). Lifeboat versus corporate ethic: Social and demographic implications of stem and joint families. Social Science & Medicine, 49, 173–184.CrossRef

Davidson, K. (2001). Late-life widowhood, selfishness and new partnership choices: A gendered perspective. Ageing and Society, 21, 297–317.CrossRef

Della Pina, M. (1993). Mezzadri e pigionali in Toscana: Le campagne pratesi [Sharecroppers and tenants in Tuscany: The countryside of Prato]. In La popolazione delle campagne Italiane in età moderna (pp. 413–426). Bologna, Italy: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice.

Derosas, R., & Saito, O. (2002). Introduction. In R. Derosas & M. Oris (Eds.), When dad died. Individuals and families coping with distress in past societies (pp. 1–13). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.

Doveri, A. (2000). Land, fertility, and family: A selected review of the literature in historical demography. Genus, LVI, 19–59.

Floria, S., & Pagliai, I. (Eds.). (2007). Inventario dell’archivio storico degli spedali riuniti di Pistoia [Inventory of the historical archive of the united hospitals of Pistoia]. Florence, Italy: Edizioni Polistampa.

Francini, M. (1984). Vecchio e nuovo nelle campagne del Circondario di Pistoia dopo l’unità: Le scritte coloniche [Old and new in the countryside of Pistoia after the Italian unification: The sharecropping contract]. Farestoria, 1, 15–29.

Goode, W. J. (1963). World revolution and family patterns. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Grilli, S., & Zanotelli, F. (2010). Scelte di famiglia. Tendenze della parentela nella società contemporanea [Family choices: Characteristics of kinship in a contemporary society]. Pisa, Italy: Edizioni ETS.

Gruber, S., & Szoltysek, M. (2012). Stem families, joint families, and the European pattern: What kind of a reconsideration do we need? Journal of Family History, 37, 105–125.CrossRef

Grundy, E. (2011). Household transitions and subsequent mortality among older people in England and Wales: Trends over three decades. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 65, 353–359.CrossRef

Hahn, S. (2002). Women in older ages: “Old” women? History of the Family, 7, 33–58.CrossRef

Hammel, E. A. (2005). Chayanov revisited: A model for the economics of complex kin units. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 7043–7046.CrossRef

Hareven, T. (1994). Aging and generational relations: A historical and life-course perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 437–461.CrossRef

Herlihy, D., & Klapisch-Zuber, C. (1978). Les Toscans et leur familles: Un etude du Catasto florentin de 1427 [Tuscans and their families: A study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427]. Paris, France: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politique.

House, T., & Keeling, M. J. (2009). Household structure and infectious disease transmission. Epidemiology and Infection, 137, 654–661.CrossRef

Hughes, M., & Gove, M. R. (1981). Living alone, social integration, and mental health. American Journal of Sociology, 87, 48–74.CrossRef

Iecovich, E., Jacobs, J., & Stessman, J. (2011). Loneliness, social network, and mortality: 18 years of follow up. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 72, 243–263.CrossRef

Kertzer, D. I. (1989). The joint family household revisited: Demographic constraints and household complexity in the European past. Journal of Family History, 14, 1–15.CrossRef

Kerzter, D. I. (1993). Introduction to part three. In D. I. Kertzer & P. R. Saller (Eds.), The family in Italy from antiquity to the present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kertzer, D. I. (1995). Toward a historical demography of aging. In D. I. Kertzer & P. Laslett (Eds.), Aging in the past: Demography, society and old age (pp. 363–383). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kertzer, D. I., Hogan, D. P., & Karweit, N. (1992). Kinship beyond the household in a nineteenth-century Italian town. Continuity and Change, 7, 103–121.CrossRef

Kerzter, D. I., & Saller, R. P. (1993). The family in Italy from antiquity to the present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Keyfitz, N., & Littman, G. (1980). Mortality in a heterogeneous population. Population Studies, 33, 333–343.

Laslett, P. (1965). The world we have lost. London, UK: Methuen.

Laslett, P. (1972). Introduction: The history of the family. In P. Laslett & R. Wall (Eds.), Household and family in past times (pp. 1–89). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Laslett, P. (1988). Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: A consideration of the “nuclear-hardship” hypothesis. Continuity and Change, 3, 153–175.CrossRef

Le Play, F. (1884). L’organisation de la famille selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps [Family organization according to the true model emerging from the history of human races and times] (3rd ed.). Tours, France: A. Mame.

Levy, M. J. (1965). Aspects of the analysis of family structure. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Li, L. W., Zhang, J., & Liang, J. (2009). Health among the oldest-old in China: Which living arrangements make a difference? Social Science & Medicine, 68, 220–227.CrossRef

Manfredini, M. (1996). L’utilizzo degli Status Animarum nelle ricostruzioni nominative: Miglioramenti informativi qualitativi e quantitativi. Il caso di Madregolo (1629–1914) [The use of Status Animarum in nominative reconstructions: Qualitative and quantitative improvements. The case-study of Madregolo (1629–1914)]. Bollettino di Demografia Storica, 24(25), 113–129.

Manfredini, M. (2003). Families in motion: The role and characteristics of household migration in a 19th-century rural Italian parish. The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, 8, 317–343.CrossRef

Manfredini, M., & Breschi, M. (2008). Socioeconomic structure and differential fertility by wealth in a mid-nineteenth century Tuscan community. Annales de Demographie Historique, 1, 15–33.

Manton, K. G., Stallard, E., & Vaupel, J. W. (1981). Methods for comparing the mortality experience of heterogeneous populations. Demography, 18, 389–410.CrossRef

Marathe, A., Lewis, B., Chen, J., & Eubank, S. (2011). Sensitivity of household transmission to household contact structure and size. PLos ONE, 6, e22461. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022461.

Martikainen, P., Nihtilä, E., & Moustgaard, H. (2008). The effects of socioeconomic status and health on transitions in living arrangements and mortality: A longitudinal analysis of elderly Finnish men and women from 1997 to 2002. Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 63, S99–S109.CrossRef

Micheli, G. A. (2011). Two strong families in Southern Europe? Re-examining the geography of kinship regimes stemming from the reciprocity mechanisms between generations. European Journal of Population, 28, 17–38.CrossRef

Neven, M. (1998). Intensity and consequences of widowhood in nineteenth century East Belgium. Revue Informatique et Statistique Dans les Sciences Humaine, 34, 125–190.

Nystedt, P. (2002). Widowhood-related mortality in Scania, Sweden during the 19th century. History of the Family, 7, 451–478.CrossRef

Oris, M., & Ochiai, E. (2002). Family crisis in the context of different family systems: Frameworks and evidence on “When dad died. In R. Derosas & M. Oris (Eds.), When dad died. Individuals and families coping with distress in past societies (pp. 17–80). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.

Papa, C. (1985). Dove sono molte braccia è molto pane. Famiglia mezzadrile tradizionale e divisione sessuale del lavoro in Umbria [Where there are many arms, there is much bread: The traditional sharecropping family and the gender division of work in Umbria]. Perugia, Italy: Editoriale Umbra.

Pazzagli, C. (1992). La terra delle città. Le campagne toscane dell’Ottocento [The land of the cities: Tuscan countryside in the nineteenth century]. Florence, Italy: Ponte alle Grazie.

Pizzetti, P., Manfredini, M., & Lucchetti, E. (2005). Variations in late-age mortality by household structure and marital status in Parma, Italy. Ageing and Society, 25, 305–318.CrossRef

Poni, C. (1978). Family and “podere” in Emilia Romagna. Journal of Family History, 1, 201–234.

Reher, D. (1998). Family ties in Western Europe: Persistent contrasts. Population and Development Review, 24, 203–234.CrossRef

Ruggles, S. (2007). The decline of intergenerational coresidence in the United States, 1850 to 2000. American Sociological Review, 72, 964–989.CrossRef

Ruggles, S. (2009). Reconsidering the Northwest European family system: Living arrangements of the aged in comparative historical perspective. Population and Development Review, 35, 249–273.CrossRef

Ruggles, S. (2010). Stem families and joint families in comparative historical perspective. Population and Development Review, 36, 563–577.CrossRef

Schulz, R., & Beach, S. R. (1999). Caregiving as a risk factor for mortality: The caregiver health effects study. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 2215–2219.CrossRef

Trussell, J., & Guinnane, T. (1993). Techniques of event-history analysis. In D. Reher & R. Schofield (Eds.), Old and new methods in historical demography (pp. 181–205). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Tsuya, N., & Kurosu, S. (2000). Mortality responses to short-term economic stress and household context in early modern Japan: Evidence from two northeastern villages. In T. Bengtsson & O. Saito (Eds.), Population and economy. From hunger to modern economic growth (pp. 421–456). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tsuya, N., & Nystedt, P. (2004). Old age mortality. In T. Bengtsson, C. Campbell, & J. Z. Lee (Eds.), Life under pressure. Mortality and living standards in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 (pp. 399–430). Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Vannucchi, E. (2002). Le vicende storiche della Venerabile Arciconfraternita della Misericordia di Pistoia [Historical vicissitudes of the Venerabile Arciconfraternita of Misericordia of Pistoia]. In 500 anni di opere. La storia dell’Arciconfraternita della Misericordia di Pistoia (pp. 9–37). Florence, Italy: Edifir.

Vaupel, J. W., & Yashin, A. I. (1985). Heterogeneity’s ruses: Some surprising effects of selection on population dynamics. The American Statistician, 39, 176–185.

Viazzo, P. P. (2003). What’s so special about the Mediterranean? Thirty years of research on household and family in Italy. Continuity and Change, 18, 111–137.CrossRef

Titel: Living Arrangements and the Elderly: An Analysis of Old-Age Mortality by Household Structure in Casalguidi, 1819–1859
verfasst von: Matteo Manfredini
Marco Breschi
Publikationsdatum: 01.10.2013
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Demography / Ausgabe 5/2013
Print ISSN: 0070-3370
Elektronische ISSN: 1533-7790
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0218-0

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 5/2013

The Compositional and Institutional Sources of Union Dissolution for Married and Unmarried Parents in the United States

Duration and Timing of Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and the Risk of Adolescent Parenthood

Residential Integration on the New Frontier: Immigrant Segregation in Established and New Destinations

Perturbation Analysis of Indices of Lifespan Variability

Young Women’s Dynamic Family Size Preferences in the Context of Transitioning Fertility

Maternal Reading Skills and Child Mortality in Nigeria: A Reassessment of Why Education Matters