Intergenerational Dependencies: Retirement and Old Age in the Prism of Family Geography

If the family is a determining element at every age in life, it is even more at old age. At the same time retirement and old age are more and more dissociated. What form does the family take for retired and ageing persons? How does the social constraint in family apply on its members?

The research undertaken until today has focused mainly on the one hand on the structural modifications affecting the households rather than the family and on the other hand on the residential mobility of the persons themselves rather than in the evolution of their environment. The aim of this research is to try to observe the spatial configurations and thus the places, not the individual or his household, but of his non co-resident family. When retiring, do individuals change their place of residence? Do they take advantage to move closer to their family? What about the following years when the individuals are ageing?  

Based on a transversal approach we will choose three life periods (the active individuals aged over 55, the retired aged under 65 and the retired aged over 75) to observe which spatial family forms are dominating and if it is possible to establish a link between the life steps after 55 years of age. This work obliges us to take into account social and demographic characteristics of individuals and their families as their mobility and family geography depends on it.

This work builds on the survey « Famille et Logement 2011 », which collected data from 369 000 individuals of both sex aged 18 and over. The survey gives information on the different places of residence of the children and parents of the individual questioned and thus allows for a mapping of the families of individuals at different age.