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ABSTRACT: Comparisons of migrants versus native populations have become increasingly important as a means of gaining insight into the factors affecting health and mortality levels and the relationship between them. Taiwan underwent a unique migration in 1949-50, as more than a million people, mostly young men, arrived from Mainland China following the Communist civil war victory. The Mainlanders were distinct from the original settlers in several ways: they represented different provinces in China, were better educated, and had distinct occupational profiles. Since 1950, Taiwan has experienced a rapid demographic transition and notable economic development, resulting in mortality decline. In this paper, we generate age- and cause-specific death rates circa 1990 by education and nativity to evaluate the relative importance of each factor. We also use longitudinal survey data to help interpret the differentials in terms of selection, risk factors, and other dynamics of health and mortality.
Ren kou xue kan / Kuo Li Tai-Wan Ta Hsueh. 12/2009; 39:1-58.
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ABSTRACT: The objective of this paper is to examine short-term trends in the prevalence of limitation in Activities of Daily Living (ADL), Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) and Nagi physical functioning tasks among persons age 60 years or older in five Asian settings: Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and the Beijing Municipality. The data come from recent panel surveys of older adults that span a period of 3-4 years during the mid to late 1990s. Results suggest a general trend toward an increase in functional limitation in four of the five settings, with the most pronounced increases occurring for the Nagi functioning tasks. Compositional differences in the population accounted for little of the increase. The paper discusses the potential implications of these results and places them in the context of past and current trends in functional limitation observed in the United States.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 10/2007; 22(3):243-61.
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ABSTRACT: Both population aging and the socioeconomic changes that often accompany it have effects on intergenerational arrangements. As a result, assessing the evolving social contract among family members is a key part of the research agenda. Studies monitoring these effects and other consequences are relatively new. Another way to gain insight is through a historical analysis that (a) traces how expectations for old-age support have changed over recent decades for cohorts advancing through their life cycle, and (b) measures how well expectations accord with actual patterns. This article uses a series of fertility surveys in Taiwan from 1965 to the 1990s to trace expectations for coresidence among cohorts of young married women and to compare these expectations with the actual living arrangements observed in surveys of the elderly in the 1990s. The results indicate sharp shifts in expectations for each of the cohorts as they aged. These shifts reflect a response to respondents' own life course events and the changing socioeconomic environment and show large and persistent differentials by education throughout the period. These factors tend to bring expectations into fairly close concordance with the actual living arrangements observed some years later. Copyright 2004 The Population Council, Inc..
Population and Development Review 01/2004; 30(3):417-448. · 2.22 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Research has implicated education as an important predictor of physical functioning in old age. Older adults in Taiwan tend to experience tight familial integration and high rates of adult-child coresidency-much more so than is typical in Western cultures-which might imply additional influences stemming from the education of children. This could arise in a number of ways; for instance, through the sharing of health-related information between child and parent, the quality of caregiving efforts, monetary assistance for medical and other services, or other psychosocial avenues. Despite this probable association, such hypotheses have rarely been tested. In this study, a nationally representative survey of older Taiwanese was used to examine these concurrent effects.
Outcome variables include the existence of any functional limitations (dichotomously measured) and the severity of functional disorders (ordinally measured). Dichotomous and ordinal logistic models were used.
Results suggest that, after adjusting for age, sex, and other factors, both child and respondent education associate with the existence of limitations, but the child's education is more important than the parent's when predicting severity of limitations.
This implies that models ignoring social network characteristics in determining health outcomes of older adults may be misspecified, at least in some non-Western societies, and calls for further testing in other societies as well.
The Journals of Gerontology Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 02/2002; 57(1):S23-32. · 2.62 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Population trends in developing countries raise concern about support for the elderly. The proportion of elderly living with extended kin is an indicator of support. This paper considers the analytic utility of a demographic decomposition of living arrangements of elderly Mexicans into population components which include weights for age and marital composition and corresponding rates or propensities. Separate decompositions for elderly males and females demonstrate the importance of population composition to the makeup of the elderly population who are living with extended kin. The utility of the decomposition for comparative analysis is demonstrated by decomposing gender differences in living arrangements. The higher proportion of women living with extended kin is primarily the result of gender differences in age-specific marital status and only secondarily the results of actual differences in propensities toward this type of living arrangement. The utility and limitations of this analytic tool for comparative research are discussed. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42990/1/10823_2004_Article_BF00116824.pdf
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