A Kinship Perspective on Shared Lifetime and Years of Life Lost by Socioeconomic Status

Amanda Martins de Almeida , Kinship Inequalities Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Individuals spend time together with their relatives during the life course. For example, the years during which an individual overlaps with their mother start counting when they are born and stop counting when either they or their mother dies. I call this the 'intergenerational shared lifetime': the time in which members of multiple generations overlap. Changes in mortality and fertility influence a population's kinship structure; e.g., if longevity increases and fertility remains unchanged, children will share more time with parents and grandparents. However, whether this shared lifetime is spent in good health is still unknown. Here, I propose to add a health component to the measurement of shared lifetimes. This Healthy Shared Lifetime builds on the existing healthy life expectancy and unhealthy life expectancy measures. I aim to estimate time that an individual can expect to live alongside parents and grandparents in a healthy or unhealthy condition. Thus, I use a retrospective approach, from children to parents and grandparents, using Danish Register Data and The National Danish Health Survey. Looking at differences in population subgroups, I apply the measures to different individuals' socioeconomic status (SES) to investigate differences in healthy shared lifetime. I expect to find a positive association between SES and a healthy shared lifetime with relatives.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 94. Intergenerational Relations and Transfers