Living Arrangements of Widowed Elderly Women and their Differentials: A Study in an Urban Setting of Tamil Nadu, India

Living arrangements in the twilight of life is a matter of primary concern for elderly widowedwomen. In view of this, an attempt is made to examine the effect of backgroundcharacteristics on the living arrangements of the widowed elderly women making use of thedata collected from 330 elderly widowed women from Coimbatore city, Tamil Nadu withfrequency and cross-tabular analyses as well as chi-square test of significance. The studyfound that slightly less than three-tenths of widowed women are old-old (75+ years). Onthe other hand, three-fifths of elderly belonged to most backward / backward caste andmajority (63%) of them illiterates. About two-fifths (42%) of the elderly widowed women areliving with married son. The differentials of elderly living alone vs with children are mostlyin expected direction and highly significant (p<0.001) with an increase in the number ofearning members in the family, number of children living in the same area / city as well asthose who belonged to the households of high standard of living. On the other hand, thepercentage of widowed elderly who live alone has shown a clear increasing pattern with anincrease in occupational status and instrumental activities of daily living scale. Further, it isnoticed that the elderly who are living alone is higher among those who are feeling unhealthy as compared to those elderly widowed women as healthy . All these percentagedifferentials are also turned out as significant at different levels of extent (p<0.001 or p<0.05).Based on these findings a few policy implications have been postulated.