Intergenerational proximity and the residential relocation of older people to care institutions and elsewhere

We investigated the extent to which the geographic proximity of adult children affected the relocations of older people in the Netherlands in 2008. A major contribution of this study is the examination of the differentiation between relocation to care institutions and elsewhere. Data from the Dutch population register linked to complementary datasets were analysed for nearly one million inhabitants aged 75 and above, using multinomial logistic regression models to estimate the effects of intergenerational proximity and of other factors on the propensity to relocate to an institution and elsewhere. An interaction of proximity with partnership status as an indicator of the presence of an important care provider was considered. We found that older people were less likely to move elsewhere when their children were living very close by, and were more likely to do so when their children were living farther away. Having children living close was negatively associated with the likelihood of moving to a care institution. Very close proximity had an additional negative effect on the propensity of older people with a partner to relocate elsewhere whereas the negative effect was less for older people without a partner on moving elsewhere. Our findings did, however, show that (recently) widowed people were more likely to move elsewhere when their children were living more than 40 kilometres away