Migration of elderly people to join existing households: some evidence from the 1991 Household Sample of Anonymised Records

In this paper the extent to which migration of the elderly is linked to changing family living situations is explored. The work described is part of a larger project concerned with the relationship between migration, kinship, and household change. Discussions of the living arrangements of older people have often referred to moves made to join adult children or other relatives. In this paper we use the Household Sample of Anonymised Records to investigate moves of this type.

The Sample of Anonymised Records allows the identification of individuals who have joined already existing households within the previous year. We make use of information on people over 65 years in Great Britain who have changed address in the previous year but are now part of a household some of whose members have not moved. This paper is confined to the limited range of information available from the 1991 census but it does allow us to estimate the number of older people making moves of this type, and to identify their age, sex, and marital status, and their relationship to the household they have joined. It is also possible to say something about the households which these people are joining, in terms of tenure and house type, and to describe the distribution of distances moved. Although the data do not allow direct inferences about whether these moves are related to the needs of the old people for care, the census question on limiting long-term illness provides data relevant to this issue.