Nina Glasgow

Rural/Urban Patterns of Aging and Caregiving in the United States

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of different residential environments on informal and formal caregiving provided to older people. The author uses two kinds of evidence to address this central concern. First, recent demographic trends are examined to ascertain the availability of informal caregivers among older people living in different places of residence. This line of inquiry focuses on the supply of potential caregivers. Second, previous research on rural/urban patterns of informal and formal caregiving for older people is reviewed. In conjunction with these two lines of inquiry, the author discusses past, present, and future trends in aging and caregiving. Because little direct evidence exists with which to examine particular aspects of rural/urban patterns of caregiving, the author discusses needed areas of future research.

Older Nonmetropolitan Residents' Evaluations of Their Transportation Arrangements

This article uses data from focus groups to examine how older nonmetropolitan residents of upstate New York construct their transportation arrangements during different stages of the life course. The article also analyzes the effectiveness of different modes of transportation in facilitating life-maintenance and higher order needs of older individuals. Almost universally, youngold (age 65 to 74) rural residents drive themselves to most of their activities; a small proportion also use public buses to fill some of their transportation needs. Old-old (age 75 and older) individuals, by necessity, rely on a wider range of transportation options because of driving cessation among some in this group. The focus groups allowed older participants to speak for themselves regarding what they liked and disliked about different transportation options, thus providing findings that policy makers and transportation planners might use for designing transportation systems that meet the needs of older rural and small-town residents.

Economic and Fiscal Implications of Nonmetropolitan Retirement Migration

Nonmetropolitan retirement counties experienced extraordinary population growth during the 1970s and continued to grow during the 1980s at a rate exceeding national, metropolitan, and nonmetropolitan averages. Economically, retirement counties outdistanced other nonmetropolitan counties in employment and per capita income growth. In tandem with population and economic growth, retirement counties have lower than average local tax and revenue rates. Expenditures per capita for local public services are also low in retirement counties, compared to nonmetropolitan counties generally. Lower than average tax and revenue rates lower the cost of living, and thus retirement counties may remain competitive with other areas of the country in attracting future in-migrants. In the long run, however, relatively low fiscal efforts and expenditures could hamper local economic development. The findings of the study indicate that retirees have not been an excessive burden on local public service expenditures, as some have feared.

The Changing Faces of Rural America

Rural Americans can still be Norwegian bachelor farmers. They can also be Hmong seamstresses, Latino businessmen, Pakistani landlords, and Filipino computer programmers. The Norwegians, meanwhile, are buying radicchio at the co-operated by newly retired women lawyers or organic basil grown by hobby farmers living on 20-acre ranchettes. Nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) places in the 21st century are very different than they were just 30 years ago. Rural populations have also changed as a significant number of retirees have moved into nonmetro places, while increasing tourism has helped to shift the nature of rural livelihoods. Simultaneously, as young people leave high schools in some rural areas to move to cities, schools and businesses are closing due to a lack of students and customers. In other places, rural schools and hospitals now must provide bilingual teachers and nurses to educate and care for new immigrants’ children. As a result, nonmetro people are now older, more likely to be female, and more ethnically diverse than in the recent past. Why did rural populations transform so dramatically in the latter part of the 20th century? Partly these changes had been coming for more than 30 years. As the economy shifted from resource extraction and manufacturing to services, and as family farms were replaced by corporate farms, the types of employment that could be found in nonmetro places was transformed. The need for low wage labor on corporate farms and in processing plants greatly augmented already existing streams of immigrant labor. At the other end of the spectrum, these technological developments, in association with rising personal affluence, also allowed people with higher incomes to move to rural places for non-economic reasons. For example, an IBM employee could have her phone ring in Atlanta; her secretary could answer the phone in Boston; and transfer the call to her actual location in Logan, Utah. Finally, while the total U.S. population was aging because of declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy, the overall age of people in nonmetro places increased even more rapidly than in metropolitan (metro) areas

Attracting Retirees as a Community Development Option

This paper compares recent trends in population and employment growth in nonmetropolitan retirement counties with those in other types of nonmetropolitan counties. Nonmetropolitan retirement counties number 481 out of approximately 2,400 nonmetropolitan U.S. counties. Since 1980, nonmetropolitan retirement counties have accounted for over half of all nonmetropolitan population growth and they have grown at a rate over four times greater than that for the remaining nonmetropolitan counties. Post-1980 employment growth in nonmetropolitan retirement counties also far outstripped that for the remaining nonmetropolitan counties. Local government fiscal data indicate increased expenditures for services to meet the needs of growing elderly populations. Strategies for community development practitioners to use in assessing the effects of retirement migration as a local development option are discussed.

Social Integration Among Older in-Migrants in Nonmetropolitan Retirement Destination Counties

Migration is closely associated with various life course transitions, and, as Longino (1990) and others have shown, retirement and migration are frequently linked. While the 2000 CPS showed that older persons tend to have a relatively low propensity to migrate (only 2.0 percent crossed county lines from 1995 to 2000 compared with 8.6 percent of persons aged 30–34), when they do move, they are more likely to move to nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) destinations.2 As a consequence, older persons have made a positive contribution to nonmetro population change in each decade since the 1960s. Regardless of the overall direction of metro to nonmetro migration—positive in the 1970s and 1990s and negative in the 1980s—more older persons have moved to nonmetro areas than in the opposite direction in each decade since the 1970s (Fulton et al., 1997).3 Counties with higher than average net in-movement of older persons are among the most rapidly and consistently growing types of nonmetro area. During the 1990s, for example, nonmetro counties with 15 percent or higher net in-migration of persons aged 60 or older grew by 28 percent compared with 8 percent for other nonmetro counties. Retirement destination counties, by definition, attract older migrants, but they also attract working-age persons who obtain jobs in economic activities induced by the in-flow of retirees (Johnson & Fuguitt, 2000). Hence, retirement migration has been an engine of nonmetro economic and demographic growth, and many states and localities have developed explicit strategies to attract retirees (Reeder, 1998; Stallman & Siegel, 1995). While a substantial amount of research has examined the geographic mobility of older Americans (De Jong et al., 1995; Litwak & Longino, 1987) and the social and economic effects of retiree migration on destination communities

Social Integration and Health of Older In-Migrants to Rural Retirement Destinations

This chapter focuses on the social embeddedness of older persons who move to rural retirement destinations (RRDs). It examines the social integration and health status of older persons living in RRDs, and compares the levels of social integration and health among older in-migrants versus non-migrants living in the same RRDs. It examines the process through which older inmigrants become socially integrated in their new communities and uses longitudinal data from a two-wave panel survey to investigate the relationship between social integration and changes in the health status of older persons living in RRDs. Whether older in-migrants adjust socially with relative ease or with great difficulty after moving to rural retirement destinations is an issue that has received very little attention in the research literature. The social integration and adjustment of older in-migrants in destination communities, however, are important topics of study because previous research demonstrates that wellbeing among older persons is at least partly contingent on their social relationships (Pillemer, Moen, Wethington and Glasgow, 2000). The very act of moving disrupts older in-migrants’ day-to-day social relationships in the origin community, and, even if they had friends, family and/or acquaintances already living in the destination community, newcomers are unlikely to be deeply embedded when they arrive. In other words, long-distance movers, including older in-migrants to RRDs, are potentially vulnerable to becoming socially isolated subsequent to their migration. This chapter examines the extent to which this might be the case and, if so, what its implications are for older migrants’ health status and functional ability.

A Demographic Deficit? Local Population Aging and Access to Services in Rural America, 1990–2010†

Population aging is being experienced by many rural communities in the U.S., as evidenced by increases in the median age and the high incidence of natural population decrease. The implications of these changes in population structure for the daily lives of the residents in such communities have received little attention. We address this issue in the current study by examining the relationship between population aging and the availability of service-providing establishments in the rural U.S. between 1990 and 2010. Using data mainly from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we estimate a series of fixed-effects regression models to identify the relationship between median age and establishment counts net of changes in overall population and other factors. We find a significant, but non-linear relationship between county median age and the total number of service-providing establishments, and counts of most specific types of services. We find a positive effect of total population size across all of our models. This total population effect is consistent with other research, but the independent effects of age structure that we observe represent a novel finding and suggest that age structure is a salient factor in local rural development and community wellbeing.

Relationships Between Deprivation and the Self-Reported Health of Older People in Northern Ireland:

Objective: There are few studies on relationships between deprivation and the self-reported health of people aged above 64 years, and no studies fully representative of Northern Ireland’s older population. This article addresses this gap. Method: Deprivation of older people as reported in the 2001 and 2011 Censuses and the relationship with self-reported health are analyzed over a 10-year span using multilevel modeling. The data are from the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS) linked to 2001-2011 Census returns. Deprivation measures include housing tenure; property value; access to a car; and educational, employment, and area-level income deprivation. Results: Older people suffering deprivation face a significant health disadvantage over a 10-year time span. Discussion: This health disadvantage is stronger in men than in women, likely due to conservative gender roles that are prevalent among Northern Ireland’s older population, leading to psychological distress especially among deprived men. The analysis found strongly significant area-level effects, aggravating the health impact of deprivation.

Volunteerism and Social Entrepreneurship Among Older In-migrants to Rural Areas

We examine level of volunteerism among older in-migrants versus longer-term older residents in rural amenity destinations in the Continental US and Hawaii. We also use case study evidence to investigate social entrepreneurship among older in-migrants to rural amenity destinations. Our findings show that older in-migrants participate in voluntary activity approximately equally to longer-term older residents. Further, older in-migrants frequently engage in social entrepreneurship by starting new organizations or re-shaping already existing organizations and institutions in rural destination communities. Older in-migrants’ high level of participation is facilitated by their relatively high socioeconomic status.