Making a Place for Space: A Demographic Spatial Perspective on Living Arrangements Among the Elderly in Historical Europe

Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged
has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata
and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the
pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and
Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the
elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalonia to the Urals during the demographic
ancien régime and thereafter. To examine the historical geography of living
arrangements among the elderly, the spatial patterns in our data are assessed using
formal tools of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis. To investigate the extent to which
the observed regional patterns are attributable to underlying demographic, socioeconomic,
or environmental variability, we specified a series of the OLS regression
models and applied the Local Indicators of Spatial Association to the models’ residuals
in order to identify the spatial clusters that cannot be explained by the chosen
set of predictors. Our findings reveal considerable variability in the living arrangements
of the elderly in historic Europe. This variability does not align very neatly
with the geographic patterns predicted by earlier historical demographic literature
and partly persists even after controlling for contextual factors. Our bottom-line
results suggest that when seeking to untangle the dynamics of European family systems,
greater spatial awareness is indispensable.