Unanswered questions and new directions in research on elderly migration: economic and demographic perspectives.
The availability of data from the 1990 Census and the Retirement and Health Survey will afford researchers an unparalleled opportunity to study elderly migration from several perspectives. This article focuses on economic and demographic issues. Census data will continue to serve the role of providing small area data on flows and will permit further disaggregation of behavioral differences according to age, marital status, and household relationship. They will also permit disaggregation according to the economic status of individuals and their households which, coupled with aggregate data on places of origin and destination, will facilitate comparison between such areas. The RHS data will go a long way to investigate questions thought to lie at the heart of migration behavior of older persons, but which have been difficult or impossible to study. Central to such questions will be the availability of a migration history, which will permit research on the interaction of migration behavior with critical life-course events such as retirement and the loss of a spouse.
Serow
W J
WJ
Center for the Study of Population, Florida State University in Tallahassee, USA.
D000368:Aged / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D011157:Population Dynamics; D011640:Public Policy; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States