RESEARCH ON AGING Larsson, Thorslund / DOES GENDER MATTER? Does Gender Matter? Differences in Patterns of Informal Support and Formal Services in a Swedish Urban Elderly Population

When facing dependency, the majority of elderly men receive care from spouses whereas elderly women more often rely on relatives or public elder care. This Swed-ish population–based study of persons between ages 81 and 100 concerns public elder care and informal support in relation to having a coresiding caregiver. Findings indi-cate that men had higher odds of receiving care when coresident and/or extraresident and/or public home help services were included, compared to women, after control-ling for functional and cognitive impairment as well as self-reported need of assis-tance with instrumental activities of daily living. After controlling also for coresiding, the gender differences disappeared. The main distinction was found between persons living alone and persons coresiding, not between men and women. Thus, when study-ing use of public elder care and support from relatives or friends, it is vital to include household composition, and thereby the possibility of receiving care from a coresiding caregiver, in the analyses. Men and womenmeet frailty in old age under different circumstances. In most countries throughout the world, women live longer than men do, which means that the probability of living without a spouse in the last period of life is higher for women than for men (Guralnik, Balfour, and Volpato 2000). The fact that women in many countries marry men who are older than themselves and that older women have lowe