The Structure and Transition of “Extended Living Arrangements” in Later Life: Evidence from Rural China

The scientific literature on late life living arrangements has focused mostly on family co-resident status or geographic proximity to an adult child. Given the potential coordination within the family support network, living arrangements should be considered simultaneously as a purposeful configuration of coresidency and adult children’s geographic distances from older parents. As such, we developed the “extended living arrangements” (ELAs) framework to capture such configurations; we also aim to examine ELA transitions and their determinants. Employing data from the 2011–2015 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study and Latent Transition Analysis, we identified seven ELAs based on distinct features of family geography in rural China. We find two traditional ELAs (i.e., traditional without spouse” and “traditional with spouse”) featuring the coresidence of multiple generations and the presence of nearby children. Although these two ELAs have the lowest levels of family financial resources, they are the ELAs that older adults are most likely to transition into when caregiving needs arise. We discover substantial heterogeneity among the three “left-behind” ELAs (i.e., “empty-nest left-behind,” “left-behind with grandchildren,” and “left-behind with nearby children”). Older adults in the “empty-nest left-behind” ELA are the most vulnerable to meeting increased caregiving needs. Evidence from our study suggests that the ELA framework offers an increased capacity to capture the complexity of the family support opportunity structures in the changing context of contemporary rural Chinese families. We also discuss the significance of our ELA framework for other contexts and its implications in light of China’s recent demographic trends and public policies.