Living Arrangements of Older Women: The Ethnic Dimension

The major task of this paper is to examine the effect of cultural or normative structures, as measured by ethnicity, on living arrangements of older, previously married women. The data were drawn from the 1/100 Public Use Sample of the 1971 Canadian Census. Two discriminant function analyses were undertaken. Ethnicity consisted of the British/French dichotomy in the first analysis and of the Jewish/Italian dichotomy in the second. In addition to ethnicity, other independent variables included in the analyses are age, education, fertility, and income. The results of both analyses indicate that fertility is the major determinant of whether or not older women live alone, followed closely by ethnicity. Income, education, and age also have some effect on living arrangements; however, these variables tend to be weaker predictors of household status than fertility and ethnicity are.