MPIDR Working Paper
Health decline and residential transitions among older adults in Europe
Afable, S. B. D.,
Vierboom, Y. C.,
Evans, M., Mikolai, J., Kulu, H.,
Myrskylä, M. MPIDR Working Paper WP-2024-018, 45 pages.
Rostock, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (July 2024)
Abstract
Residential mobility is one strategy to cope with the challenges of ageing. But how health decline triggers residential mobility and whether this relationship differs by parental status remain underexplored. Using data on parents and non-parents aged 50+ from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we perform multinomial logistic regression to examine how recent and previous experiences of acute health events, functional limitation, worsened frailty status, and worsened self-rated health influence the two-year probability of transitions between independent private home living, co-residence with a child (among parents), receiving home-based care, and nursing home admission. We find that none of the health variables are associated with parents’ co-residential moves with adult children, while acute health events, functional limitation, and worsened frailty are associated with transitions to home-based care for parents and non-parents alike. Previous experiences of these health declines have a stronger influence on most residential transitions compared to their recent counterparts across parental status, suggesting that the “triggering” effects of health on residential mobility take time. Our findings demonstrate the importance of viewing late-life residential mobility from a relational, competing risk framework, and highlight home-based care as key strategy for responding to health challenges in later life.
Keywords: Europe, ageing, health, residential mobility