Attitudes of the Elderly Towards Living Arrangements

The aim of this paper is twofold:(1) to present evidence supporting the contention that the significant rise in older people living alone has been influenced by transformations in societal values, attitudes and norms, and (2) to discuss several key methodological issues that appear when subjective variables such as privacy, independence and social expectations are integrated into our research to explain housing and living arrangement decisions. In particular, attention is devoted to individual rationalizations of current living arrangements as well as causal direction and independence of the attitudinal factors. The data used in this work were drawn from a 1983 study based on living arrangement decision-making among the elderly.