Variation in Elderly Friendliness across the U.S. States: Operationalization, Rankings, and Selected Consequences
Texas Christian University
Texas Christian University
The United States faces a rapidly growing population of elderly citizens. To learn more about their prospects, we engage in three tasks. First, we develop and operationalize a five-dimensional concept, "state elderly friendliness," that facilitates assessing various political, economic, and social aspects of state environments that influence the well-being of elderly persons. Second, we rank states on the five dimensions of this concept. We find large differences both within states across various dimensions and across states on individual dimensions. Third, we demonstrate that differences in states' ranks on our dimensional scales are associated with sharp variations in particular societal outcomes of importance for the well-being of various segments of the elderly.
AUTHORS' NOTE: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Theory Construction and Methodology Workshop of the National Council of Family Relations, Vancouver, British Columbia, 18 November 2003. We thank Twyla Hill, Sarah Matthews, and Merril Silverstein for comments on this earlier paper. We express appreciation as well to Murray A. Straus for help with the concept of "state elderly friendliness," to the late Marc Miringoff and also Marque-Luisa Miringoff for the example of The Social Health of the Nation, and two extremely helpful anonymous reviewers for Publius: The Journal of Federalism.