Trends Across Cohorts in Older Adults’ Assistive Technology Use and Personal Assistance Use

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Multigenerational Family Practices

Abstract

In this brief report I use data from the National Long-Term Care Survey to describe and explain trends in older adults’ personal assistance use and assistive technology use. I find far more substantial declines in older adults’ receipt of family care than previous research that has focused on period trends. The percentage of older adults from the most recent birth cohort I examine who received personal assistance from a family caregiver or unpaid friend was less than half that observed among older adults born about 40 years earlier. I consider three explanations for this trend: older adults’ decreasing needs for care, structural changes in family relationships, and the increasing availability of alternatives to family care. After controlling for a variety of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of respondents, I find that the declining trend in family care is little changed. A substantial decline in informal personal assistance use occurred even among those with greater access to informal caregiving resources, suggesting that structural changes in family relationships were not relevant to explaining the trends. Among older adults with more modest needs for care, family care and professional in-home care have declined in tandem, while more severely impaired older adults’ receipt of formal personal assistance has stayed fairly constant across cohorts regardless of their Medicaid eligibility. By contrast, assistive technology use as the sole modality to deal with impairments has been increasing and has offset about 20 percent of the decline in personal assistance use from both informal and formal sources.

Author

• Alexander L. Janus, University of Oxford