Discussion questions
Casper and Bianchi 2002 - Grandparenting
1) Is home ownership really indicating the direction of the intergenerational flows? Could it not be the case that parents put the house and children interchange their salaries?
2) Chicken or Egg? Is seems that poverty is high in 3-generation or skipped-generation families composed by women independently of the sex of the grandchildren. Are they poor because they live together or they live together because they are poor? Do we really need a man (breadwinner) to be out of poverty?
3) Grandparents who maintain their homes are more educated and more likely to be working. Does'nt this look like a contradiction? Are'nt these characteristics positively related with the well-being of their children? So, why ar etheir children living with them?
4) Big increases in the life expectancy at birth coupled with the increase of teen-age pregnancy could make 4 generation families more common. How would things work in the presence of more intergenerational kin?
5) In view of this reading's findings; what can we learn about U.S. grandparents and their living arrangements that could be useful in the context of parental absence due to death (like in Africa because of AIDS) or due to migration (like in Mexico because of Mexico-U.S. emigration).
Couch, Daly, and Wolf. 1999
1) Since caregiving seems to be a responsibility of women (they are more likely to be caregivers and care-receives), to what extent are the "global" measures of couples' joint money to parents, time to parents, labor market time, housework time are hiding gender differences in caregiving? Do the explanatory variables let us understand that gender differences within the couples model?
2) Would it not be better to use the proportion of the family income which is designated to help parents rather than the amount of money family gives? Is the hourly-wage explanatory variable telling us the difference between having the money and giving the money?
3) In the model, the authors consider grandchildren younger than 18 to be competing with grandparents for parents' time and money. Could it not be that they, or grandchildren 18+ also, are helping and facilitating parents caregiving for example helping with housework?
4) Are housework and time to parents really mutually exclusive? E.g. cooking for your coresident family as well as for your elderly parent.
5) It seems that only around one fifth of non-corresident elderly in the U.S. receive financial transfers from their adult children. Can we extend the finding of this paper to (1) coresident elderly (2) future generations of elderly (3) other societies?
6) What do the findings of this paper tell us about the "deinstitutionalization" of the family in the U.S.? Are married people more likely to provide care to their elderly kin than the unmarried people? Looking through this mirror is the family working o.k.?
Wolf and Soldo 1988
1) Since the authors are controlling for the number of children available but not for the age of each of them, to which extent they are mixing the two points in life course that parent and children share resident? (from childhood to young adulthood in the case of children, and elderly in the case of parents) (recall that unmarried sons and daughters are more likely to coreside with their unmarried mother)
2) In order to really capture the competitive risk of living with one or another child, would not longitudinal data be necessary? How are siblings competing if the residential transition has already occured? How can we know if the conditions of the children were the same before and after their mother's residential change?
3) Around 70% of the unmarried women live alone. Do the findings of this paper allow us to predict which will be the living arrangement of these women in the future? E.g. Suppose this worst-case scenario: the one-quarter of the sample who has no living child are also the never married and the ones who do not have any siblings or parents alive. Which future we can expect for this women in terms of this paper's findings? (remember that race and income seems to make the differences)
4) By missing the children's age it is not very clear if we are measuring "late-nest-leaving" or mother's living arrangements at older ages. In view of the findings, would it not be better to have children very late (delay childbearing) to ensure that somebody will take care of you in the future?
Lee, Parish, and Willis. 1994. & Lillard, and Willis. 1997.
1. Both articles deal with Asian countries and suggest that ‘old-age insurance or altruistic motivation' framework fits well. Can we apply same theoretical framework to to U.S., Western or Latin countries? If there are differences in activities and motivations in intergenerational transfers, what kinds of factors cause the differences? How much variation across countries, do you think, are explained by can economic factors (public programs for old age security, health insurance, stability of economic situations)? Then what about cultural factors such as ‘filial piety' in Asian culture?
2. Intergenerational transfers would vary across economic classes. Also the motives of same transfer behaviors would be different: intergenerational transfers would mean exchanging gifts to upper economic classes, while old-age support or vital insurance system to people with little economic resources. Do you think these studies capture variations within country well? If not, how can we capture the differences across social classes and integrate the differences into existing theories of intergenerational transfers?
3. Intergenerational transfers would also vary across life courses of parents and children. The amount of transfer from adult children to parents would change due to children's income and assets accumulation which, in many cases, increase with age. Or, in some societies, transfers from parents to children would concentrate around specific life events such as marriage. Do you think including life course perspectives would be helpful for understanding actual behaviors and motives of intergenerational transfers?
4. Both studies observe transfers during one year period. Related to previous questions on life course perspective, do you think this one-year period long enough to represent general transfer behavior?
5. In case of Malaysia, there is heterogeneity of transfer behavior - ‘some families tend to engage in a lot of transfer activities and others in very little activities'. What kind of factors, do you think, would cause this heterogeneity? And what implication does this heterogeneity have on intergenerational transfer theories?