Melvyn Goldstein Geoff Childs Case Western Reserve
The study will contribute to our understanding of social dynamics underlying how the rural elderly in developing nations deal with family and intergenerational support networks under conditions of rapid socio-economic change induced by the process of modernization. The project focuses on communities where old-age care continues to be provided first and foremost by immediate family members and in particular, will investigate in detail how the same set of development forces impact rural elderly in different ways by examining the strategies that the elderly, as actors, undertake toward the goal of assuring old-age care from family members. The central hypothesis is that the elderly, as well as those who are approaching old age, do not respond homogeneously to these changes, but rather utilize different strategies of adaptation regarding intergenerational relations and old-age care systems. Understanding the social dynamics of this process will enhance existing explanatory frameworks on how rural elders and their families in the developing world deal with rapid socio-economic change. Utilizing data generated by the approaches and methods of gerontology, demography and anthropology, the project will construct a dynamic model of modernization and intergeneration relations that moves beyond the standard question of whether or not modernization negatively affects the elderly, to a more dynamic and theoretically heuristic explication of how the elderly differentially adapt to the changes wrought by development (at any stage of the process). The project employs a natural experimental research design that will study three rural areas in the Tibetan Autonomous Region in China, which differs with respect to the extent of economic development they have experienced. These three study sites possess the same language, culture, religion and social organization, and differ only in their exposure to the development transition. This design allows for research on this issue at an incipient stage of developmental, an intermediate stage, and a later stage
Broader Impacts. The research will foster international scientific interaction between U.S. and Tibetan scholars. It will contribute to important public policy debates in the developing world and the international aid community about how to cope with the impact of socio-economic development and changes in population structure on the rural elderly and their families, in particular, the alarming evidence that the family and economic bonds that traditionally secured the elderly to families and intergenerational kin networks are weakening. By enhancing our understanding of the processes underlying how rural elderly differentially adapt, this research will assist provide policy planners to better deal with global aging in the rural third world.
