Examining the Distribution of the Elderly and Accessibility to Essential Services

AbstractElderly people are less likely to travel long distances or make complex trips and consequently their level of access to services is often less than that of younger people living in the same area. An appropriate residential location may therefore be more critical in old age than at any other time in life. This research uses Geographical Information System (GIS) software to quantify twenty variables that the literature suggests impact elderly residential location decisions. It then examines how well each of these variables explains the current elderly population distribution of Adelaide, South Australia. The results are used to build a conceptual framework of elderly migration that can assist decision makers and stakeholders endeavouring to strategically improve the quality of life of elderly people in urban areas. The research finds that the distribution of people aged 75 years and over is explained better by an area's access to services than by socio-economic, migration or housing related statistics and that the reverse is true for recent retirees. The results enable the importance of specific services to be ranked for four elderly age groups and demonstrate how suburbs with unexpectedly high or low numbers of elderly residents can be identified