Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis study examines whether the gender gap in long-term care use in the Netherlands has changed between 1995 and 2016. Previous research has shown that women use more formal care services than men, while men use more informal care. In the past decades, there have been changes in the individual determinants of care use, such as health and social resources, and care provision. This raises the question of whether gender differences in care use have also changed over time. The Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) involved respondents aged 70–88 in seven waves: 1995/96, 1998/99, 2002/03, 2005/06, 2008/09, 2011/12 and 2015/16 (N = 6,527 observations). Generalised estimating equations (GEE) were used to analyse changes in the impact of gender on the use of informal and formal home care, residential care and private home care, and the non-use of care. Men used more informal care provided by a partner than women, but women used other sources of care more than men. Individual social resources explained the gender gap in informal and formal home care use, and health and social resources explained the gap in residential care. In the non-use of care and, to some extent, in residential care use, the gender gap widened over the years to the disadvantage of men and was not explained by health and social resources. The persistent and even increasing gender gap in the non-use of care over time warrants an exploration of the role of gender in seeking care and access to care, and a closer examination of the role of long-term care policies in maintaining this gap.

As a result of the rapid ageing of societies, meeting the demands for long-term care has become increasingly difficult. In the Netherlands, informal care is recognised as a key element to compensate for cut-backs in formal care provision. Formal, informal and privately paid long-term care services, however, are not used equally across socio-economic status (SES) groups and whether these inequalities have been reduced or exacerbated over time has not been researched. This study investigates to what extent educational and income inequalities in the use of formal, informal and privately paid care have changed over time. Data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) was used from three points in time: 1995 (N = 787), 2005 (N = 550) and 2015 (N = 473). Participants were between 75 and 85 years of age and living independently. The results indicate that lower SES groups are consistently more likely to use formal and informal care, and less likely to use privately paid care compared to higher SES groups. An increase in inequality was only found in the use of informal care; while informal care use is stable among lower SES groups, it decreases steeply among higher SES groups. These findings highlight the importance of education for explaining variation and changes over time in care use. Governmental efforts to mobilise informal care-givers might be outweighed by trends towards less long-term care.

AbstractThe convoy model conceptualizes older adults' networks of personal relationships as convoys of social support. This prospective study examined how contact and support in several relationships changed due to widowhood. Using observations between 1992 and 2002 from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, multilevel models describe change in contact and support of 227 widowed and 408 married older adults. Contact and support were low before widowhood and increased in all relationships after widowhood, and more so in child and sibling relationships. Around 2.5 years after widowhood, contact and support started to decrease. Our findings increase our understanding of the heterogeneity of network changes in old age and of the instability of the network as a social convoy in late life.