The Irish Elderly Who Live Alone: Patterns of Contact and Aid

Employing data from a recent national the survey of people 65 and over residing in Republic of Ireland, questioning the assumption that living alone constitutes a problem, this paper uses multiple regression analysis to explore variation in recency of contact with (1) children, (2) siblings and (3) access to aid during illness. While theoretically coherent variables explain a substantial amount of variation in recency of contact with children and to a lesser degree with siblings, only a modest amount of the variation in aid during illness is explained.