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Living arrangements of older adults have often been studied as a measure of the support available to them. Given the rapidly ageing and low fertility context of Singapore where the prevalence of older adults living alone and without children is expected to increase, we construct multistate life tables to estimate the number of years that older persons can expect to live in different living arrangements at a population level (population-based) as well as based on their initial living arrangement (status-based). We focus particularly on whether there are gender differences in the expected years of life in different living arrangement states. We use the Panel on Health and Ageing of Singaporean Elderly, a 2009 nationally representative survey of 4990 Singaporeans aged 60 years and older, with follow-up surveys in 2011 and 2015. In calculating the probabilities of transition between different states, we control for number of children, housing type, and time-varying ADL limitations. We find that at age 60, women can expect to spend more than twice the proportion (18%) of their remaining lives living alone compared to men (7%). Status-based estimates indicate that the proportion of remaining years living with a child is higher for women initially living alone, with a spouse only or already with a child, compared to males. Our results indicate that while older women are more likely to live alone compared to their male counterparts, older women living alone are also more likely to transition to living with children. Our research sheds light on the importance of expanding research on life expectancy beyond health, to consider analysis using other forms of social stratification, particularly gender differences in states of living arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies on longitudinal continuity of adversity have mostly examined persistence of individual adversity, rather than of families and have focussed mainly on material disadvantage. However, adversity is multi-dimensional, and in the case of families with children, it includes psychosocial as well as material elements. While both material and psychosocial elements are recognized as critical to child development, these aspects of family adversity are often studied in isolation and there is a dearth of longitudinal evidence on the extent to which such factors are transient or persistent. Using the first three waves (2004-2005, 2006-2007, 2008-2009) of the longitudinal study of Australian children this paper investigated the consistency and continuity of multiple adversity in families with children using material and psychosocial indicators. First, longitudinal factor analysis determined that a consistent factor structure of multiple adversity adequately fit the data longitudinally. Second, cross-tabular analysis showed significant changes in the prevalence of specific adversities over waves. In particular adversity related to changes in family composition and social support followed an increasing trend. Adversity in two material elements-economic status and hardship-decreased over time. Third, variance-components models revealed that though aggregate scores of material and psychosocial adversity indicated a high degree of continuity over time, continuity in disaggregated measures showed that within families a great deal of variability in adversity occurs, with intra-class correlations ranging from 0.27 to 0.84. The more persistent forms of adversity-family, substance use, economic adversity-are areas where targeted interventions are feasible while employment conditions and time pressure are more transient and may require intervention at the population level to reduce overall prevalence of the adversities. Our study has reinforced the need to assess psychosocial adversity in studies of families with children as a balance to the more commonly utilized material adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of children's development and parents' wellbeing have not dealt effectively with the complexity of multiple disadvantage. Traditional approaches have typically used a limited set of outcomes and predictors. Even studies utilizing multiple risk factors have often treated these as confounders, adjusting for their influence, while concentrating on a primary association of interest. Such strategies do not illuminate the real world essence of disadvantage, i.e. that adversities co-occur more than expected by chance and that multiple disadvantage is common. The main aim of the present paper is to address this neglected topic and develop summary measures of adversity using the 2004-2005 data from Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Information was obtained from families of 5,107 babies (0-1 years) and families of 4,983 children (4-5 years). The prevalence of multiple disadvantage among families with young children and the degree to which summary adversity measures are associated with each other and with family and child outcomes is then estimated. Using factor analysis, 12 lower-order constructs and two higher-order components of adversity were developed, labelled (1) material and (2) psychosocial adversity. Findings show that the two component scores were more strongly associated with outcomes than were the more specific construct scores and that psychosocial adversity was somewhat more relevant to family wellbeing and child development than material adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]