THE RURAL TIBET MODERNIZATION AND INTERGENERATIONAL
RELATIONS PROJECT (Funded by NSF-HSD Program, 2006-08)
1. AIMS
This project will investigate a major problem in Modernization and Aging Theory
and in the growing literature on Global Aging—namely, the social dynamics underlying
how Third World rural elderly deal with family and intergenerational support networks
under conditions of rapid socio-economic change. In particular, it will investigate in
detail how the same set of development forces in a given area impact different 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. Our central premise 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 (Cattell, 1997, Goldstein
and Beall 1986, Goldstein and Ku 1993, Yee 1997). Understanding the social dynamics
of this process is critical for enhancing our explanatory frameworks on how rural elders
and their families in the developing world deal with rapid socio-economic change. The
proposed study will investigate these issues by conducting a multi-method, interdisciplinary in-depth study of three rural communities in the Tibet Autonomous Region
of China that are at different stages of economic development.
Farming plowing in Sogang Village, 2006
The developing world is now undergoing the changes in population structure that
accompanied the demographic and gerontological transition in the developed world. The
median age in the developing world has increased from 23.2 in 1995 to 29.1 in 2002
[United Nations, 2003] and over half of the world’s elderly now live in the developing
world (59%). By 2030, this is projected to increase to 71% (Bengtson et. al. 2003).
Moreover, as life expectancy continues to increase and fertility decline accelerates, the
proportion of elderly throughout the world will increase faster than the total population
[Global Population Profile: 2002, 51]. For example, whereas it took France 115 years to
increase its percentage of elderly from 7 to 14, this will only take 20 years or less in most
developing countries (HelpAge 2000). By 2020, the number of elderly in the developing
world will be more than double that of the developed world. In addition to these changes
in population structure, socio-economic development is creating major changes in life for
the elderly and their families. For the younger generation, especially, greater access to
education, opportunities for temporary or permanent out-migration for wage labor, new
knowledge not accessible to the elderly and new values about the centrality of nuclear
families are creating new conditions for the elderly. The impact of such rapid socioeconomic change for the elderly and their families has become a major concern for public
policy in developing countries (Malhotra and Kabeer, 2002) because there is substantial
evidence that the filial and economic bonds that secured the elderly to families and
intergenerational kin networks is weakening, destituting many elderly (Aboderin 2003,
2004A, 2004B, Apt 1996, Bengtson et. al. 2003, HelpAge 2000, 2002, Goldstein et al.
1990, 1993). Some observers see this as a trend that will only increase as population
aging in the developing world accelerates, and have started to refer to it as the crisis of
global aging (Gujaral 2004).
Betsag village, 2007, old and new threshing/winnowing together
The relationship between socio-economic development and population aging in
the developing world, however, is poorly understood (United Nations, 2003). It is clear
that the family/intergenerational support system is not weakened in all instances of
modernization and all elderly do not experience such negative results (Rhodes, 1982,
Holmes and Rhodes, 1995, Palmore 1975, 1985). A fundamental, and not well
understood, research question, therefore, is how and why such change negatively or
positively affects the elderly in the rural developing world (where most of the elderly
live). Research on these issues in the developing world is still in its infancy (Malhotra
and Kabeer 2002), and until now has not focused on what we suggest is a critical
dimension, namely, how the elderly differentially adapt to these new forces, and what
factors account for these different responses and outcomes. The proposed project is
designed to answer these questions and will produce the first in depth study of this issue.
Because this issue has both an important basic science dimension and a important public
policy dimension, we are proposing to address this using a multi-disciplinary approach
that will incorporate the micro-level methods of anthropology with the macro-level
methods and frameworks of demography and gerontology. The integration of these
paradigms and methods at all stages of the project will generate an effective synergism
that will allow us to better understand this complex problem at multiple levels.
Anthropologists and gerontologists have been studying aging seriously since the
1970’s when the aging and modernization theory first appeared (Cowgill and Holmes
1972; Cowgill 1974). This theoretical framework argued that the status and material
well-being of the elderly declines with the advent of modernization. It has engendered
lively debate and controversy, but inconsistent findings. Since the 1970s, a body of
research has been produced by gerontologists, historians, anthropologists and other social
scientists that both supports and contradicts this theory of a negative relationship between
modernization and the well-being of the elderly. For example, the contention that one of
the outcomes of modernization is a shift from extended families to nuclear families has
been criticized by historians who have shown that the presence of a large number of
nuclear families in the West predated modernization (Fischer, 1978, Laslett 1972, 1976,
Quadagno 1982, 1999,). It has also been criticized empirically by a number of
anthropologists and gerontologists who have argued that in countries like Samoa and
Japan, the status of the elderly did not decline (Rhodes, 1982, 1984, Holmes and
Rhoades, 1983, 1995, Palmore, 1975, 1985, Rosenberg, 1997, Sokolovsky 1997).
However, the majority of the literature for developing countries to some degree supports
the aging and modernization hypothesis (Albert and Cattell 1994, Aboderin 2003, Apt
1996, Bengtson et. al, 1975, Cattell 1989, Maxwell and Silverman, 1970, Foner 1993,
HelpAge 2000, van der Geest, 2004), including evidence that modernization can
indirectly affect the situation of the elderly in the developing world (Goldstein and Beall
1982).
Moreover, a competing paradigm has been suggested that argues that it is growing
poverty that is changing the support relations between generations, not modernization per
se (DeLehr, 1992, Goldstein et. al. 1983). Commonly referred to as the “materialist
explanation,” it argues that economic constraints force children to choose between
supporting their own children and their parents, and they increasingly choose the needs of
their children (Aboderin 2003, 2004). Like the modernization and aging paradigm, it
offers useful insights but it is now clear that it does not alone explain the complex
situation of how the elderly and their families adapt to such significant changes.
Furthermore, demographers working in the developing world have paid
considerable attention to the connections between high fertility and old-age security. In
societies where children are the primary caretakers for the elderly, old-age security
concerns provide an inducement to high fertility, a proposition stemming from Caldwell’s
hypothesis (1976) that having many offspring is rational when wealth flows from
children to parents. Nugent (1985) proposed eight conditions under which the old-age
security motive could lead to high fertility: (1) underdeveloped capital markets, (2)
uncertainty about the accumulation necessary for old age and disability, (3) absence or
inefficiency of insurance programs, (4) loyalty of children to their parents, (5) absence of
markets for nonstandard labor, (6) underdeveloped markets for the goods and services
that elderly people consume, (7) absence of a young spouse, and (8) perception of the
relative importance of old age. South Asia has provided fertile ground for debating the
relationship between high fertility and old-age security, with scholars finding both
positive (Cain 1981, 1991; Dharmalingam 1994) and negative (Vlassoff 1990, 1991)
evidence. The implicit assumption of Nugent’s hypothesis is that a fertility transition will
lead to declining support for the elderly if nothing replaces the family-based system of
care. Nevertheless, the impact that demographic transitions have on old-age security
concerns is a topic that has not received much attention despite the fact that fertility
transitions are underway in precisely those settings where governments are not
implementing social security programs (c.f., Han 1994; Johnson 1996). One study that
has revealed shifting conceptions of the family found evidence that, under conditions of
demographic transition, parents conceptualize old-age security and inter-generational
relations as being rooted in the quality rather than the quantity of their children (Knodel
1998), which is further evidence that, in order to better understand intra-household
dynamics, it is important to examine parents’ differential investments in children
according to gender, parity, and aptitude (Boone 1986; Bledsoe 1990, 1994).
In summary, modernization, materialist, and old-age security paradigms posit that
development is a catalyst for inter-generational discontinuities which diminish the status
of the elderly and the level of care they receive from family members; impoverishment
that accompanies modernization leads to a reduction in support for the elderly by their
offspring who are unable to devote sufficient resources to both aging parents and their
own children; and fertility transitions that are not accompanied by a rise in government or
other non-family services to provide for the elderly result in a reduction of the care that
aging parents can expect to receive.
Although the volume of the literature on change and the elderly in the developing
world is still limited in size, taken together, the corpus of research reveal clearly that
how, why and when traditional behavior and attitudes within families change is still very
poorly understood. There is, therefore, a critical need for new and innovative research in
developing countries that will investigate the complex social dynamics accompanying
this process of change, and in particular, will examine how and why these changes
differentially impact the elderly and intergenerational relations in a given area.
The proposed project will address this issue using a mix of methods and
conceptual frameworks derived from anthropology and gerontology through a research
design that treats the elderly not as the usual passive and homogeneous category that is
acted upon by “change,” but as actors with agency who are actively adapting to the
changes around them. A key component of our study will be to investigate this process
in both emic and etic terms, in other words, through the cultural categories the subjects
themselves utilize, as well as the basic conceptual frameworks of anthropology,
demography and gerontology.
This project will diverge from past research in several key ways: (1) by using an
approach that treats the elderly as heterogeneous; (2) by focusing on the process by which
changes affect different elderly in different ways by seeking to explicate how and why
different elderly have managed the changes they face differently; (3) by treating the
provisioning of old-age care as a negotiated process between parents and children that
transpires throughout a household’s domestic cycle; and (4) by treating individual elderly
and their children as agents of change who make long-term decisions in an environment
of social, economic, and political uncertainty and (5) by integrating the micro-village
level of analysis with macro level alternatives to family support, for example welfare.
To accomplish this, the proposed project will utilize a natural experimental
research design that will study three rural areas in the Tibetan Autonomous Region in
China which differ with respect to the extent of economic development they have
experienced (see Methods section for a discussion of this). These three study sites possess
the same language, culture, religion and social organization, and differ only in their
exposure to the development transition. This will permit us to examine the issues at an
incipient stage of developmental change, an intermediate stage, and a later stage.
Furthermore, each of the study sites had high fertility in the early 1980s, but have since
undergone rapid demographic transitions and are now approaching replacement-level
fertility (Childs et. al. n.d.). Therefore, demographic processes at the sites are similar,
whereas their stages in the development process differ.
In summary, the goal of the project is to systematically investigate how the rural
elderly at three stages of socio-economic development in Tibet are adapting to these
changes by examining the strategies that they undertake toward the goal of assuring oldage care from family members. By virtue of the emic and etic data we will collect, we
shall construct a dynamic model of cross-cultural aging 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 elderly in a given area
differentially adapt to the changes wrought by development (at any stage of the process).
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
Research Design
The study will be carried out in three rural farming village areas in Shigatse
Prefecture in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Each village has roughly 100
households and a population of roughly 500 individuals. The Tibet Autonomous Region
of China is an area that is well-suited to the proposed investigation because (1) the rapid
process of economic development that began in China in the 1980s has reached these
areas, particularly since 2000 when a special program of developing the western regions
of the China (including Tibet) was begun, (2) the rural population is now gaining
increasing access to education and contraception, (3) emerging wage labor opportunities
are drawing young people to urban areas, (4) a fertility transition is underway and nearing
completion, (5) the PI and Co-PI have extensive experience working in Tibetan cultural
settings, Goldstein in India, Nepal and Tibet, and Childs in India and Nepal. Both are
fluent in the Tibetan language. In particular, Goldstein and Case Western Reserve
University’s Center for Research on Tibet have had a collaborative relationship with the
Tibet Academy of Social Sciences (TASS) since 1986, conducting over ten stints of
fieldwork on change and development in Tibet. Case Western Reserve has also trained
ethnic Tibetan researchers from the TASS, some for short-term English and
Anthropology training, and 3 for longer term graduate anthropological training focusing
on in cross-cultural aging. Two of these received a M.A. degree and one, Ben Jiao
(Benjor), a Ph.D. degree. Ben Jiao, has worked on joint research with Goldstein for over
a decade and will serve as the field director of the Tibetan research team for this project.
A request for affiliation with TASS for the proposed project has been submitted, and
given our long and productive relationship, we anticipate no problems securing
permission and cooperation.
The research design will employ a natural experimental model by controlling for
cultural factors. The three research sites are all ethnic Tibetan and share the same
religion, language, family norms and values. They differ in the extent of the impact of
modernization/socio-economic development. The village area that has been least
impacted is situated in the upper part of a side valley and is still overwhelmingly
agricultural. Levels of education and literacy are low and the area has no paved roads,
running water or electricity. Nevertheless, change is occurring for reasons explained in
the preliminary findings section below. The second rural research site is located at the
confluence of the side valley and the main valley and is immediately adjacent to a large
county seat (an emergent town). It is located on a paved road midway between Tibet’s
second and third largest cities (Shigatse and Gyantse) for which there is regular bus
service that takes less than an hour. The level of education and literacy is high as
villagers attend the county seat’s more sophisticated schools. The village area has
electricity, running water, access to China’s cell phone network, and villagers are much
more involved in non-farm economy, although all families also still work their farms.
The third research site is located in the suburbs of Tibet’s second largest city, Shigatse.
Shigatse is a rapidly growing urban area and the villagers from this site are much more
intimately involved in the new market economy in Tibet and China, many commuting to
jobs in the city.
These research sites are appropriate for studying differential adaptations in the
family-based old age care system because of their varying degrees of socioeconomic
development and their particular stages in the demographic transition. According to
Cowgill’s hypothesis (1979), these places should now be experiencing increasing intergenerational competition as the population ages, technological advances render the skills
of the elderly obsolete, urbanization results in the formation of independent households
and residential segregation, and secular education resulting in an inversion of age-based
status associated with knowledge. Goldstein’s recent pilot study provides evidence that
these processes are now underway.
Preliminary Findings
The PI (Goldstein) has been conducting research on rural development and
change in the Tibet Autonomous Region since 1986 in nomadic communities and since
1997 in rural farming communities. Beginning in 1997, a large field study of 780
households in 13 farming villages in 4 rural administrative areas (xiang) was begun
(Goldstein, et. al. 2002, 2003). As part of this project, in 2002, pilot research on the
elderly and intergenerational relations was conducted in the least impacted of the
proposed research sites.
Background on rural Tibet
In the mid to late 1960’s, agricultural (and pastoral) communes were created in
Tibet. All the land and animals privately held by families were turned over to the
commune and households ceased to operate as the basic units of production. Individuals
now worked for the collective whose leaders ordered individuals where to work and what
to do. Individuals received a basic food allotment regardless of the work they did, as well
as an additional payment based on the amount of “work points” they earned. A standard
daily amount of “work points” was set for every job in the commune and individuals
earned work points depending on the number of days they worked and the number of
work points associated with their jobs on each day.
This system of agricultural communes ended in Tibet in about 1980-82 and was
replaced with the quasi-market system called the “responsibility system.” At this point,
the commune’s total land and animals were divided equally among its members on a one
time basis. All individuals who were alive on the day of division received an equal share.
Anyone born after that day did not get any land or animals but when individuals who
received a share of land died, their land remained in their household. From then on, the
corporate family became the basic unit of production as it had been prior to the start of
communes. At the same time, the underlying politico-economic ideology changed. In
place of equality in lifestyle and class struggle, Deng Xiaoping’s call to work hard and
“get rich” were now institutionalized. A new economic era began, and the standard of
living has improved, but important changes have also occurred.
First is a serious decline in per capita land holdings. As a result of population
growth and fixed land size, there has been an average decline of 20% in per capita land
holdings. Since population momentum will cause Tibet’s rural population to continue to
grow during the next decade despite the fertility transition (see Goldstein et. al. 2001),
this process of per capital land decline will continue.
Second, the cost of living is increasing. In addition to general inflation, the price
of key subsidized products such as chemical fertilizers has increased substantially, while
at the same time there has been a marked decrease in government subsidies as China’s
socialist market economy has been more fully implemented. This trend is likely to
escalate in the years ahead.
Compensating for this by trying to increase yields will not be easy because
farmers are already using high levels of chemical fertilizers and improved seeds. It is
remotely possible that a new cash crop could increase profits, but with the exception of
vegetable gardening, there is nothing obvious waiting in the wings. Similarly, it is
unlikely that the value of Tibetan crops will increase and compensate for the changes.
The market for Tibetan crops is limited and declining. Tibetan barley and wheat have no
export potential outside of Tibet because Chinese do not eat barley and find the Tibetan
wheat too coarse. And even within Tibet, the increasing consumption by Tibetans of rice,
vegetables and imported white flour, means they are consuming less barley and Tibetan
wheat, and this trajectory is likely to increase.
Tibetan farmers are acutely aware of these changes and challenges. It is
increasing clear to rural villagers that without a source of non-farm income it will be
difficult for households who are now self-sufficient from their fields to remain so if they
do not have some modicum of non-farm income. Consequently, rural families are
increasingly deciding that at least one member of their family needs to “go for income”
as they call migrant labor in this area. In 1998, 49% of all households reported that they
had one or more members doing non-farm labor. In the least impacted research site, most
of these villagers worked as manual laborers on construction projects for 3-4 months in a
year. These socioeconomic changes have been accompanied by a rapid fertility decline,
one that will have immediate and future impacts on family compositions and household
economic strategies.
Pilot Study
In the summer of 2002, pilot research with all the elderly and their families was
conducted in the village area that will be the last impacted research site by means of an
open-ended interview instrument. Subjects were encouraged to respond to questions at
length. This village contained 28 elderly individuals aged 60 or older. 54% of these were
female, 14% (4) were 80 or older and 36% were in their 70’s. 43% were married, and the
same percent were widowed, and 14% were unmarried.
In traditional Tibet the elderly expected to live with at least one child in a
corporate family household that owned property and maintained its continuity and name
across generations. We found that that was still the case. 96% of these elderly lived with
their families. Only one elderly ex-nun lived alone. Moreover, most did only light work
such as spinning wool, feeding animals, sweeping, babysitting, although some did some
cooking, herding, irrigating work and even plowing. All had time to do “leisure”
activities such as religion, e.g., saying prayers or doing circumambulation, although the
amount they engaged in religious activities varied. 54% said they spent less than one hour
a day on prayers, 21% said about 1 hour per day, and 25% said more than one hour.
Consequently, on the surface the elderly were living with their families and their situation
seemed secure and unchanged despite the changing world around them.
However, living in families and the appearance of a continuation of traditional
relations is somewhat misleading, and a process of change is underway that is beginning
to affect the elderly and intergenerational relations within the family. The general
indication of this was a constant complaining about “revolutionary children.” The term
“revolutionary children” was used pejoratively to describe the younger generation. This
term was used in a positive sense during the Cultural Revolution to designate the new
generation of children born after the start of socialist society in 1959. These were the first
generation to be free from the influence of the old theocratic society, and therefore the
first the communist party considered really able to better understand and accept socialist
ideals, values and education. However, the elders in this village were clearly using this
term pejoratively. To the elderly, the “children of the revolution,” are not the new
paragons of virtue but rather a new generation who are not obedient, talk back, don’t
work hard, like to spend money on themselves, and are more demanding of autonomy
and control of the management of the family corporations than ever before. At the same
time, the elderly also intellectually understood the central importance of non-farm income
for the future success of their household and thus they are working, in different ways and
with different degrees of success, to adapt to the new situation.
The pilot study found that the elderly had not experienced these changes the same.
For example, 43% of the elderly said that their status at home was not high but 57% said
it was. 14% said that children’s behavior was now better than when they were young, but
32% said it was worse, Moreover, only 52% of the elderly said that their relations with
family members was good while 29% said they were just okay and 19% said they were
bad. These different responses were not correlated with any of the standard sociodemographic variables such as economic status, gender, age, marital status or household
composition. So while it was clear that the rapid modernization that China in general is
experiencing is becoming a basic part of rural Tibet even in this least affected area, we do
not understand how and why different individuals and families are experiencing this
differently. It is precisely this divergence at the ground level that needs to be investigated
and that this project proposes to focus on. Without understanding this reality, new
explanatory models can not be developed.
Research Questions and Methods
We propose to use a broad range of methods to document the (1) living
arrangements of the elderly, (2) the status of the elderly, (3) intergenerational solidarity
and support, and (4) intergenerational negotiations. Most major studies of the elderly,
whether longitudinal or cross-sectional, are based on the statistical analysis of survey
data. Although the strengths of quantitative approaches are evident, many gerontologists
are now paying more attention to qualitative methods in the recognition that aging, as a
process, is rooted in social relations that can be studied through in-depth interviewing
(Cobb and Forbes 2002; Rowles and Schoenberg 2002). Therefore, we will use a
combination of qualitative methods and cross-sectional surveys to document the
condition of the elderly at the present time in terms of living arrangements, status, and
intergenerational solidarity and support. Our methodology will introduce a diachronic
perspective via life history analysis, the purpose being to shed light on how current
conditions are the result of long-term strategies and decisions that transpire over the life
course. We will deploy the same combination of methods in each of our three research
sites in order to facilitate comparisons, with modernization being a key independent
variable. As mentioned above, these sites are very similar with respect to culture,
religion, language, economy, demographic processes, and social organization. The
primary difference is their respective levels of modernization as measured by education
and literacy, engagement in the wage-labor economy, access to consumer goods,
exposure to modern forms of media, access to markets, and proximity to towns or cities
where the forces of development are most evident. By studying intra-household
processes in the three study sites, we expect to uncover a continuum of strategies in
response to changing socioeconomic conditions stemming from modernization.
Due to the innovative nature of the objective, our research does not commence
with an initial set of hypotheses, nor are we reliant upon a single theoretical perspective.
Rather, our research strategy is based on an inductive, grounded theory approach which
will lead to the formulation of testable hypotheses. During the first year of research we
will gather quantitative data through socioeconomic and gerontological surveys, as well
as qualitative data through participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviewing,
and life history interviewing. The use of multiple methods will increase the reliability
and validity of our data (verification through triangulation), and will generate data that
can be used to construct an inductive, theoretical model of aging that treats the elderly as
heterogeneous and agents of change. The model will be constructed during the second
year of the project and will be used in subsequent visits to the field sites to test the
hypotheses that it generates (see research schedule below for details.)
1. Living Arrangements of the Elderly
In the pilot study Goldstein found that almost all of the elderly co-reside with one
or more child, which is to be expected given the stem family norm in Tibetan society.
This contrasts with the situation in developed countries where the proximity of children
to their parents varies over the life course and is influenced by the needs of each
respective generation (Silverstein 1995). Drawing on this finding, and on the recognition
that close proximity between children and parents is no longer assured due to
urbanization and labor migration, we want to know who resides with parents, as well as
how often those individuals are absent from the household. We will also seek basic
background information on all individuals, as well as the set of assets in each household’s
possession.
With the help of trained Tibetan research assistants from the Tibet Academy of
Social Sciences, we will simultaneously conduct a socioeconomic survey and a
gerontological survey, both of which will include all households (n=300) in all three
research sites (Year 1, Phase 1). To assure maximum participation, the surveys will be
conducted in January and February when most people are at home to celebrate the
Tibetan New Year. The socioeconomic survey will gather data to document (1) the
demographic profile of the study areas; (2) household compositions; (3) reproductive
histories of all elderly women; (4) current residences of all children who have at one time
belonged to the household; (5) educational levels and occupations of each household
member; (6) marital status of all children who have at one time belonged to the
household; (7) the full range of economic activities that all household members engage
in; (8) seasonal mobility of all residents of the household, (9) the consumer goods (e.g.,
televisions, radios, motorbikes) held by each household; (10) and each household’s
exposure to different media sources. The data will provide baseline information on, for
example, the age-sex composition and age-dependency ratio of the study sites, the set of
offspring that each of the elderly can potentially rely upon for support and for what
percentage of each year they can do so, where all the children live, and how they earn a
living. In addition to providing contextual background information, the survey will
generate baseline data for assessing the differences between the three study sites with
respect to levels of socioeconomic development and the living conditions of the elderly.
2. Status of the Elderly
The status of the elderly will be assessed using both qualitative and quantitative
research methods. As pointed out by Goldstein and Beall (1981), the concept of status
can be operationalized by breaking it into various discrete components. In this study we
will focus on authority status (power and authority exercised in the community and
family, including the ability to influence economic decisions within the household),
economic status (resources and wealth controlled by the elderly), household status (the
type of household situation in which the elderly live), psychological status (the degree to
which the elderly are satisfied with their present situation), and ritual status (the role the
elderly play in ritual life).
Some components of status will be measured through the socioeconomic and
gerontological surveys. The socioeconomic survey will gather data on the household
status of each individual elderly (family structure and composition), while the
gerontological survey will contain questions pertaining to authority status, economic
status, psychological status, and ritual status. Specifically, the gerontological survey will
be designed to measure the self-ascribed status of each elderly person, and whether
individuals perceive recent or future changes in their status. With respect to authority
status, the survey will include questions about whether or not children follow parents’
advice under specific circumstances (how to manage the household economy, when and
how to perform ritual activities, etc.) We will construct a respect/deference scale to
measure how the elderly self-report the nature of their interactions with their children,
including whether or not they use polite and honorific language within and outside the
house, whether they talk back, and whether they reserve a special place by the hearth.
Economic status will be measured through an assessment of the assets controlled by each
elderly person. Psychological status will be measured through questions centering on
whether the elderly are satisfied with specific aspects of their situation (e.g., living
arrangements, level of support received from children, level of respect shown by the
younger generations). Finally, ritual status will be addressed through questions on who
performs which ritual functions in both household and communal contexts.
With this data we will seek similarities and differences between the emic and etic
definitions of status. The emic perspective is essential for understanding how the actors
themselves think subjectively about their own situations. Anthropological approaches to
gerontology have generally sought emic perspectives on the aging process (e.g., Kertzer
and Keith 1984; Sokolovsky 1997; Lamb 2000; van der Geest 2002), and recent
interdisciplinary research has demonstrated how emic understandings are crucial for
contextualizing quantitative observations (Traphagan and Knight 2003). Therefore, we
want to explore how the concepts of status are acted upon under discrete circumstances in
everyday life, and uncover any changes that may be occurring or that people perceive are
occurring with respect to their status. The resulting data, in combination with data from
the gerontological survey, will be used to address the following questions.
Status of the Elderly (etic perspective):
a. Do the elderly maintain separate living quarters within the house?
b. Are the elderly accorded positions of symbolic prestige within the
household, as indicated by where they generally sit, or when they are
served meals?
c. Are there differences in the types and amounts of food consumed by the
elderly and younger generations within the same household?
d. Do the elderly maintain positions of relative prestige with respect to their
ritual status in the household? Specifically, do they perform the daily rites
of purification and protection? Are they responsible for contacting and
acting as intermediaries between household members and liturgical
specialists? Do they represent their households at communal rituals?
e. Do children of the elderly treat them with deference (as observed in verbal
and non-verbal interactions) in the public realm? In the private realm?
f. Do children seek advice from, or defer to their elderly parents, when
making major economic decisions associated with the household?
g. Who controls the household budget? Who makes decisions about
discretionary spending on items such as non-essential consumer goods?
Status of the Elderly (emic perspective):
h. How is the status of the elderly defined emically?
i. What terms are used by the elderly to refer to the younger generations?
What terms do the younger generations use to refer to the elderly?
j. What is the self-proclaimed status of each individual elderly person?
k. What concepts do they refer to when assessing their own status?
l. Do the elderly feel that they make valuable contributions to the welfare of
their children, households, and community?
m. Do the elderly feel that they are accorded respect by the younger
generation in general, and their own children in particular?
n. Is there a perception that the status of the elderly has undergone changes
in recent times? What are the perceived reasons for those changes?
3. Intergenerational Solidarity and Support
The National Research Council recently identified transfer systems, which in the
context of aging in the developing world refers primarily to intergenerational transfers
between family members, as a key area for future research. As stated in their report,
“The well-being of older persons depends to a large extent on the content and volume of
an intricate set of transfer systems in which they are engaged over their lifetimes” (NRC
2001:11-12). Documenting levels of intergenerational support at the present time is an
essential step toward the goal of uncovering the decision-making processes that resulted
in current conditions of the elderly.
Our approach to this topic is informed by intergenerational solidarity, a construct
that is used to assess relationships between parents and their children from both
subjective and objective perspectives (Roberts, Richards and Bengston 1991). As
Bengston argues (1996), intergenerational solidarity can be a good predictor of social
support that parents receive from their children (Bengston 1996). Intergenerational
solidarity includes the following components: affectual solidarity (the amount of positive
sentiment about family members), associational solidarity (type and frequency of
interactions between generations), consensual solidarity (the level of agreement about
values and intergenerational orientations), functional solidarity (the degree to which
support services are exchanged), normative solidarity (expectations regarding social
support and filial obligations), and structural solidarity (the “opportunity structure” for
intergenerational interactions which is based on family composition and geographic
proximity of family members.
We will assess all components of intergenerational solidarity through the
socioeconomic survey, the gerontological survey, and focus group interviews. To start
with, the socioeconomic survey will generate data on each household’s “opportunity
structure” (structural solidarity, which is essentially the same as the household status
discussed above) by documenting the age-sex composition of each family’s set of
offspring, where each family member lives, and for what portion of the year they are coresident with aging parents. Furthermore, drawing from the work of Bengston and
colleagues, our gerontological survey will measure other components of intergenerational
solidarity. The survey will include questions to measure affectual, associational,
consensual, and normative solidarity, but will focus more on functional solidarity which
will be broken into four categories: physical care (bathing, dressing, going to the
bathroom), household assistance (cooking, cleaning, going to the market), financial
support, and material support (providing clothing, consumer goods, food). We will
construct scales to measure the level of assistance needed by every elderly person for
each of the four categories, and then document the “support functions” (Antonucci 1990)
of all family members, that is, what each child contributes to the support of elderly
parents, and what each parent contributes to the support of their children.
Based on the understanding that cultural norms provide an environment in which
actual behaviors transpire, we want to gather emic perspectives on who should care for
the elderly. Consensual and normative solidarity, which in effect are emic constructs,
will be addressed through focus group interviews, a method that is more appropriate for
gathering data on cultural ideals than on actual behaviors (Morgan; Helitzer-Allen et. al.
1994; Morgan 1997). The focus groups will be composed of people falling into four
categories: (1) the elderly (aged 65 and above) who are currently being cared for by
family members (or others); (2) those who are approaching old age (people in their 50s
and early 60s) and are currently in the intensive phase of strategizing for elderly care; (3)
the children of those who are elderly and in need of care; (4) the adult children of those
who are approaching old age. We will conduct three focus groups for each category in
each of the fieldwork settings. Since we will still be in the exploratory data gathering
phase of research, and since we will not have completed our preliminary analysis of the
socioeconomic and gerontological surveys, we will rely on convenience sampling to
select participants. Our purpose is to gather information that reflects on values and
intergenerational orientations (consensual solidarity), as well as expectations of who
among family members should provide support for the elderly, when they should do so,
and what types of support they should provide (normative solidarity). We will
accomplish this objective by using cultural domain analysis (Weller and Romney 1988).
We will start by free listing potential caretakers for the elderly, a list that can include
immediate family members, more distant relatives, friends and neighbors. We will then
ask participants to rank order the list from most to least appropriate caretakers. Through
the ensuing discussions, we will discover if there is consensus or disagreement within and
across age groups, both within and across research settings.
The data gathered in this initial research phase will be used to answer the
following questions on actual practices (as documented by the survey) and cultural norms
(as documented in the focus groups):
Actual Practices (etic perspective):
a. Which child (or children) in each household acts as the primary, in situ
caretaker for elderly parents?
b. In what ways does each of a household’s children – whether present or
absent from the field site – contribute to the support of elderly parents in
terms of physical care, household assistance, financial support, and
material support?
c. In what ways do parents contribute to the continuing welfare of each of
their adult children through, for example, the provisioning of care for
grandchildren, financial support for continuing education, seed money for
business ventures, and providing access to kinship and other social
networks?
Cultural Norms (emic perspective):
d. Based on age, parity, gender, and marital status, which children should
care for elderly parents? Why?
e. Is there a difference in terms of who should care for a widow versus a
widower parent? Why?
f. Which child should provide physical care? Household assistance?
Financial support? Material support? Why?
g. In what ways should elderly parents assist their children? Should they
provide financial support? Childcare to free their children for other
productive or educational activities? When should they relinquish
heritable assets?
After completing the initial phase of research we will return to Lhasa where we
will employ research assistants to enter the data from the socioeconomic and
gerontological surveys and to transcribe the focus group interviews (Year 1, Phase 2).
The data will be entered in SPSS; we will use multiple regression analysis to identify
strong or weak correlations between dependent variables (e.g., levels of care received and
self-perceived status of the elderly) and independent variables (e.g., level of
modernization, household composition, children’s education, and involvement of
children in wage labor activities outside of the household.) This preliminary level of
analysis will be used to select households at each of the three field sites for more
intensive analysis using qualitative research methods. Furthermore, we expect that the
focus groups will illuminate the most salient issues that people of both the elder and
younger generations perceive with respect to old-age care, and therefore the data will be
instrumental in the development of interview schedules.
We will select at least 24 households from each research site for detailed analysis,
or roughly one in four households from each village. In order to gain perspectives on the
most salient inter-generational issues that occur during different stages of the household
development cycle, at each site we will select 8 households that are headed by parents in
their 50s, 60s, and 70s respectively. We will use purposive sampling to select households
representing a range of compositions, levels of support that the elderly receive from
children, and statuses of the elderly. We feel that a detailed qualitative investigation of
roughly 72 households will generate sufficient data to reveal the diversity of strategies
that led to the outcomes measured by the surveys. The sample size is flexible and can be
adjusted according to perceived needs while undertaking the research.
4. Intergenerational Negotiations
We start with the premise that parents invest differentially in their children in
order to influence, both positively and negatively, attachments and obligations to the
natal household. They do so through a long-term series of exchanges, for example, by
investing in one particular child’s education or directing a child toward a certain
vocation. We will approach intergenerational negotiations from a life course perspective
that has been used extensively in gerontology (Bengston and Allen 1993), and that seeks
to explain how decisions made throughout one’s life in relation to historical events and
individual opportunities affect outcomes later in life (Elder 1994). We will also draw
from social exchange theory which posits that those with more valued resources assist
those with less (Bengston et. al. 1997; Hendricks 1995; Becker et. al. 2003). In essence,
this means that the flow of assistance will shift from parent-child to child-parent over the
life course. Such a process has been viewed in gerontology as a “support bank” where
individuals make deposits (e.g., investments in their children) when they have resources
so that they can later make withdrawals (receive old-age support) when the need arises
(Antonucci 1985). Exchanges are rarely one-way, but are mostly reciprocal (Velkoff and
Lawson 1998), and the intensity of transfers over time can affect children’s propensities
to care for their parents in old age (Silverstein et. al. 2002; Fang and Whyte 2003).
Finally, exchanges are not just limited to material goods and tangible services. Chen
(2003) identifies three strategies that parents can use in an attempt to obligate their
children to provide support in old age. They can use the lure of prospective benefits such
as inheritance, exchange services with their children, or appeal to the commonality of
interests between the generations. Together, these issues raise several questions; do
parents use their superior resource base in middle age to try to secure future obligations
from their children? Do they do so using a conscious strategy? If so, do they focus more
attention on some children than others, and is this reflected in the relative level of support
they receive in old age from each child? Do they enter into explicit agreements with their
children with regard to the exchange of services? Do they appeal to commonality of
interests as a part of a negotiating strategy?
Intergenerational negotiations in the context of modernization are influenced by
emerging economic opportunities that may entail temporary or permanent labor
migration. Such migrations can threaten the level of physical care and household
assistance provided by children, but can enhance the level of financial and material
support. We therefore want to find out if parents try to diversify their household’s
subsistence base by encouraging some children to take advantage of these opportunities,
while at the same time restricting the opportunities of other children in order to assure a
caretaker. Do they consider financial and material support an adequate substitute for
physical care and household assistance? If aging parents still perceive a need for a
resident caretaker, and with the full-time co-residence of children no longer assured, what
measures do they take to enhance the ties that bind children to the household? If parents
have fewer resources to negotiate with as they age, and if co-residence of children is no
longer assured, then how do they try to assure that their current and future needs will be
met?
A related issue is parental influence over marriage. Findings from wealthy
counties show a correlation between the level of support parents receive and the marital
status of their children, with nonmarried children being more likely to transfer resources
than married children (Boaz et. al. 1999). Co-PI Childs’ study of old-age in a Tibetan
community of Nepal uncovered a conscious, long-term strategy by parents to assure that
one of their children would remain a caretaker in old age. The preferred caretaker is the
family’s eldest daughter who is ordained a nun when she is young. By effectively
eliminating any chance she will marry, and by not sending her to a convent, she remains
beholden to the natal household as her parents age. In the meantime, parents often ordain
a son to be a monk who is sent off to a distant monastery. After he matures, he sends
cash remunerations gained through the performance of rituals (Childs 2001). These
tendencies are consistent with the finding that negotiations between parents and their
children vary by gender (Spitze and Logan 1990; Horton and Arber 2004), and raise
several questions. In what way do parents view the relationship between the marriages of
their children and the level of old age care they can expect in the future? How do they
attempt to influence whom, or whether, their children marry? In what way are those
strategies related to the age, parity, gender, and the individual attributes of children? In
what way are those strategies related to the provisioning of support?
Furthermore, control over and distribution of household assets is a key issue when
it comes to understanding how intergenerational relations transpire over time. Since
marriage entails the distribution of household assets, it is crucial to know how parents
attempt to influence the timing of each marital event, and whether they make explicit
links between the distributions of inheritance and the provisioning of old-age care. If so,
that would represent a definite strategy for enhancing children’s ties to the household.
During this second phase of the research (Year 1, Phase 3) we will conduct indepth interviews with aging parents and their children, and will include people from each
of the four age categories listed above. These people will be drawn from the households
(24 at each research site) that are identified for intensive research after preliminary
analysis of the survey data. For the elderly and those approaching old age, we will
employ a combination of life story (Atkinson 1998) and person-centered (Levy and
Hollan 1998) interviewing strategies. Life story interviewing is used to understand how
people construct subjective meanings of their own life trajectories. We will use this
technique to explore the development and nature of elderly people’s relationships with
their children throughout the life course. Person-centered interviewing is a technique for
uncovering the interplay between cultural ideals and how they are negotiated in practice
by treating the subject as both a key informant (one who expresses general cultural
knowledge) and as a respondent (one who describes specific cultural experiences as they
transpired in his or her own experience.) A combination of these interviewing techniques
will generate data that can provide a diachronic perspective by documenting how current
levels of intergenerational support have been negotiated over the life course, and how
individuals have reacted to changing cultural norms and economic realities induced by
development.
We will also interview children of the elderly in the sampled households using the
same combination of interviewing techniques (life story and person-centered). In this
case we will focus on how they perceived their own treatment by parents in relation to the
treatment of siblings. Furthermore, we will use ethnographic decision modeling, a
technique that uses qualitative interviewing data to predict the choices that people make
under specific circumstances (Gladwin 1989). The decision we will investigate is
whether to migrate elsewhere (and if so, whether temporarily or permanently) or to
remain in one’s natal village. We are especially interested in knowing the extent that
decisions are influenced by parental support or the perceived needs of aging parents. We
will therefore interview individuals (both males and females) who have moved more or
less permanently away, who engage only in seasonal migration, and who remain
permanently at home. Our interviews will reveal the decision criteria for migration, and
from this data we will build a composite model of the decision-making process that
accounts for all possible outcomes.
Finally, long-term residence in each of the villages will facilitate the use of
participant observation. Through this method we will observe the interactions between
the elderly and their children as they transpire in natural settings, which will provide
contextual data on a range of issues. Participant observation will act as an important
check on the survey data by revealing, for example, whether children treat elderly parents
with deference in public and private settings, or whether parents are accorded positions of
symbolic prestige as indicated by where they sit in the household or during public rituals
and meetings. Participant observation will allow us to witness some forms of exchange
as they transpire. For example, we will learn more about the precise circumstances under
which the elderly people care for their grandchildren, and the specific tasks that the
children’s parents engage in once freed from childcare duties. While privy to such
events, we can conduct informal interviews to discover whether the elderly expect
something in return, or whether they are acting in a more altruistic sense. Not only will
participant observation help us formulate appropriate questions to ask during interviews
(Keith 1986), but the method will also facilitate a tacit understanding of the data that
emerges from such interviews (Dewalt and DeWalt 1998).