Popul Res Policy Rev (2009) 28:271–289

DOI 10.1007/s11113-008-9099-0

The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal:

An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis

P. C. Albuquerque

Received: 4 September 2007 / Accepted: 10 June 2008 / Published online: 26 June 2008
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract Portugal, a southern European country, is expected to exhibit a rela-

tively large proportion of extended households. However, following some general
trends associated with large social transformations, Portugal is also expected to have
an increasingly larger proportion of nuclear families. We use data from the eight
waves of ECHP (European Community Household Panel), covering the years from
1994 to 2001, to establish whether these expectations are justified. Among the
nuclear households that include elderly members, we isolate those corresponding to
single-person households, since they are particularly relevant for policy purposes.
Separate analyses are carried out for the elderly with health problems and for those
with no health problems, in order to detect different patterns of living arrangements.
We also project the living arrangements until 2005, based on an age-period-cohort
analysis. We find that the extended households are a very significant form of living
arrangement with reference to the Portuguese elderly, and a living arrangement
whose importance is not declining over time. In particular, the oldest old constitutes
the group that tends to be found living most frequently in extended households,
while those with health problems start much earlier than those with no health
problems to live in extended households as they grow older. The proportion of
individuals aged 65+ living alone has somewhat decreased, but the proportion of
this type of household largely increases with age.

Keywords Elderly
Extended household
Living arrangements

Nuclear household

P. C. Albuquerque (&)
ISEG, Technical University of Lisbon, Rua Miguel Lupi, 20, Gab. 604, 1200-725 Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: pcma@iseg.utl.pt

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272 P. C. Albuquerque

Introduction

Portugal has an ageing population, as is the case in developed western countries in

general. This phenomenon has accompanied other extensive social transformations:
the family has lost its basic cell position in relation to the individual; more women
participate in the labour market; the conception of the first child is, on average,
being delayed, yet continuing to require specific care when grandparents become
old, which imposes conflicting demands on prime-age adults; there has been a
strong trend towards urbanisation, which is usually associated with more expensive
land, and therefore, smaller houses. All these aspects may act as deterrents to
co-residence with elderly parents, particularly those who are frail. However, some
of the above-mentioned factors may also act as stimuli to co-residence. For instance,
with both parents in the labour market, the grandparents’ proximity may become
more important. In addition, if children are born when the grandparents are already
old, the latter are probably no longer active workers and thus have more time to help
their children and grandchildren. The rise in the divorce rate and the spread in the
use of drugs and in HIV infection may indeed demand the active presence of
grandparents in the household. For interesting insights into the changes associated
with demographic ageing in industrialised societies, see Harper (2003) and Daly
(2005).
Therefore, given this combination of forces, it is not a foregone conclusion that
the elderly will be found increasingly to be living alone, or only with their spouse.
The living arrangements of the elderly are an important determinant of their well-
being.
Reasons may be highlighted that justify the notion that co-residence improves the
old person’s well-being: there are increasing returns in sharing a house, for instance,
in domestic services (cleaning, laundry, meals), in the shared payment of rent, in
consumption expenses (e.g. electricity, telephone, cable TV). Help with personal
care, entertainment and companionship may also be more easily available when the
elderly share a house than when they live alone.1 There may be less likelihood of
feeling lonely, although this will depend on the amount of contact that the old
person has during the day and the number of contacts that would be maintained if
he/she was not living with the family.
In spite of the advantages of co-residence, there are also potential negative
effects. Loss of independence, loss of authority, negative personal relations or
difficulty in adapting to the living style of the new co-residents may prove damaging
to the well-being of an aged individual.
Whilst data on living arrangements does not allow an inference on the level of
older people’s well-being, it does reveal the way that society organises itself to take
care of its elderly. Furthermore, as Domingo and Casterline (1992, p. 63) put it: ‘‘It
is those with whom they co-reside that the elderly most rely on and, in turn, to
whom they offer the most services.’’
1
Burch and Matthews (1987), followed by Wolf (1994) and Palloni (2000), note that each household’s
living situation is like a composite good that includes physical shelter, domestic services, personal care,
privacy, power/authority, independence, recreation, companionship and consumption of economies of
scale.

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 273

Due to the data set that is used, we consider only people living in the community,
excluding those in institutions. With regard to the living arrangements of
community-living seniors, the fundamental distinction to be made is whether an
elderly individual lives in an extended or in a nuclear household.
The precise way in which we define extended and nuclear households is clarified
in the next section. From the types of households included in the concept of nuclear
households, the elderly living alone merit particular attention since their needs may
be qualitatively different from the needs of those integrated in any other types of
household. A factor that clearly influences the need for care and the interpretation of
the distinction between nuclear and extended households is the health status of the
elderly. We also introduce this element in the analysis.
If family structures change, the need for formal support will consequently
correspondingly change. Hence, this study should be of value to policymakers.
However, there are also implications for the demand for certain consumption goods
and for housing. As such, this is an issue that is also relevant to private business.
Traditionally, southern European households are believed to exhibit a significant
tendency towards extended co-residence with the elderly, compared with other
cultures (Clarke and Neidert 1992 and all references within; Tomassini et al. 2004;
Glaser et al. 2004). Nevertheless, Portuguese families are not specifically identified in
most studies.2 The Portuguese case merits research for two reasons: the first is to verify
whether the above-mentioned tendency indeed applies to Portuguese households;
secondly, on the basis of the findings, to seek to establish what, if any, changes have
occurred within the trend in the country. The observation of a persistently important
dimension of extended co-residence with the elderly would be consistent with the
characterisation of southern Europe, Portugal included, as a region with rudimentary
welfare states that rely largely on informal family support (Wall et al. 2001).
In this paper, we provide some insights into the recent evolution of the living
arrangements of the elderly living in the community in Portugal. This is
accomplished in two ways: (1) we describe the actual trends between 1994 and
2001; (2) we project trends since 2001, the date of the last available data, up to 2005.
In order to achieve our purposes, we use the APC (Age-Period-Cohort)
methodology.
The rest of the article is organised as follows: first, we describe the data; then, we
present the model that is used in the empirical analysis, and report the empirical
results; next, we obtain projections based on the estimated model; and finally, we
conclude.

The Data

We base our empirical study on the eight waves of the ECHP––European

Community Household Panel––for Portugal. The ECHP is an annual survey targeted
2
Fine exceptions are Iacovou (2000a) and Iacovou (2000b). ECHP data is used to compare the living
arrangements of older people in thirteen countries in the European Union, including Portugal. They are
cross-sectional analyses, using only one wave of the survey. Tomassini et al. (2004) and Glaser et al.
(2004) also include Portugal in their analyses.

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274 P. C. Albuquerque

at individuals living in private households. The first year of the panel is 1994 and the
last one is 2001. The ECHP provides weights designed to make it cross-sectionally
representative by correcting any sampling distortion and ensuring that the data
reflects the population structure by sex, age, household size and other criteria. The
cross-section weights, which we use, correspond to the variable PG002.3
This study explores the division of households into nuclear and extended. We
need to obtain the respective proportions (one proportion is equal to 1 minus the
other proportion), and they are not directly available from the ECHP data. We
calculate the proportion of nuclear households (pnuc). A household is classified as
nuclear if it is composed of
– a couple with children all under 26 years of age
– or any subset of this.
All other types of households are extended, seizing all those that include
elements who would not be present in a family with dependent children (under 26).
Extended households comprehend:
– Households with siblings older than 25;
– Households with children older than 25;
– Households with grandparents, grandchildren (including those under 26) and no
parents;
– Households with nephews, nieces or other relatives other than children or
siblings.
The nuclear household includes the traditional basic cell of society (couple with
children) but also the units that are different from that but cannot be considered
extended in comparison to it, like the monoparental family or the single individual,
for example. The traditional basic cell of society of parents with children is one
where parents are rearing their children. When children are grown up, they are
expected to build their own nuclear families. If, at that time, they choose not to
move, or if after that time they go back to sharing residence with their parents or
siblings, they are forming an extended household. We consider the breaking up time
as 26 years of age. This assumption is somewhat arbitrary. The intention is to
capture adult children who could have their own households, who are expected not
to be dependent on their parents, but who choose to live with them. 26 seems to be a
reasonable age, although there will certainly be children who are still dependent at
that age and others who have achieved independence before that age.
We pool the data. After classifying all individuals as living in a nuclear,
extended, or single-person household, they are grouped into age categories for each
survey year. The proportions are the ratios of all individuals living in the respective
household type over the sum of all individuals, for a certain age group i and a
certain survey year j. As we need data for age-cohort pairs, and not for age-year
pairs, we make the conversion using the information contained in Table 1
(Age-Period-Cohort relationships in our data).

3
For a detailed description of the weighting procedure used in the ECHP, see http://www.cmh.
ens.fr/acsdm2/equalsoc/ECHP/PAN165-200306.pdf.

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 275

Table 1 Age period cohort matrix

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

84 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917

83 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918
82 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919
81 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920
80 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921
79 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922
78 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923
77 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924
76 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925
75 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926
74 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927
73 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928
72 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929
71 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930
70 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931
69 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932
68 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933
67 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934
66 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935
65 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936

We focus on individuals aged 65 and over, which coincides with the most
frequent definition of old age. The oldest cohort is, therefore, the one born in 1910,
and the youngest is the one born in 1936.
The data set yields 160 observations resulting from 8 years of observations of 20
age categories. Our last age category consists of those aged 84. The reason why we
do not include older individuals is that in the 1994 wave, all individuals aged 85 and
older were aggregated in a single composite category. However, a composite
category would be problematic when attributing the correspondent cohort. The
proportions are calculated based on 15,712 (weighted) cells, each cell corresponding
to a certain individual with a certain age, between 65 and 84. The same individual
with another age will correspond to another cell. For example, to calculate the
proportion of individuals living in nuclear households who are aged 65 and belong
to the cohort born in 1930, we must observe these individuals in the 1995 survey
year. When we seek to consider the proportion of individuals living in nuclear
households who are aged 66 and belong to the cohort born in 1931, it is likely that
many individuals are the same, but this time observed in the 1996 survey year.
In order to classify households as extended or nuclear, we use the whole sample,
which amounts to 91,437 cells.
The evolution of the proportion of nuclear households is presented in Chart 1. It
can be observed that despite the fact that most of the elderly live in nuclear

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276 P. C. Albuquerque

Chart 1 Actual and projected proportion of nuclear households

Chart 2 Actual and projected proportion of one person households

households (between 57% and 69% of the elderly), this proportion has been
decreasing. Between 1994 and 2001, it decreased 17%.
Chart 2 shows the evolution of the proportion of single-person households. A
slight decrease is observed: about 9%. Since the proportion of nuclear households has
decreased more, this means that the single-person households have been growing as a
proportion of the nuclear. They account for around 30% of the nuclear households.
The observation of these trends for the entire sample may mask differences in
particular sub-groups of the population. One important potential factor of
differentiation could be the health status. On one hand, unhealthy elderly need
more assistance, but on the other hand, they are less able to help children and
grandchildren. These two sides of the same coin have opposing expected effects on
the propensity to live in extended or nuclear households. Another reason for the
distinction between the healthy and the unhealthy is the different dimension that
living alone represents for individuals in each of these sub-groups.

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 277

In order to investigate whether there are differences in the proportions of

extended, nuclear and single households according to the health status of the elderly
elements, we identify individuals with health problems as those who respond ‘‘Yes,
severely’’ or ‘‘Yes, to some extent’’ to the question ‘‘Are you hampered in your daily
activities by any physical or mental health problem, illness or disability?’’.
Individuals with no health problems are those who answer ‘‘No’’.
Charts 3 and 4 depict the trends of both sub-groups separately.
The proportion of elderly individuals with health problems (HP) who live alone is
slightly smaller than the proportion of elderly individuals with no health problems
(NHP) living alone. With respect to the proportion of extended households, there are
years in which the healthy elderly individuals exhibit higher proportions, and other
years when the reverse is true. When we observe the elderly with no health
problems, the last two years of the sample present what seems like an inversion in
the decreasing trend of the proportion of nuclear households. On the contrary, the
decreasing trend is even more remarkable when calculations are based on the
elderly with health problems.

Chart 3 Proportion of elderly individuals with/without health problems in nuclear households (with
relation to the elderly with the same health status)

Chart 4 Proportion of elderly individuals with/without health problems in single person households
(with relation to the elderly with the same health status)

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278 P. C. Albuquerque

The charts do not provide any information about the nature of the trends that they
exhibit. We distinguish among three intrinsically different forces behind the
identified trends through an Age-Period-Cohort model.

The Model

In order to understand and project the evolution of the living arrangements, it is

useful to identify what is behind the observed evolution. Is it the ageing of the
population that, with the change in the age structure of the population, alters the
proportion of the individuals who live in extended or nuclear families? This would
be the age effect. Is it the entrance of new cohorts to old age that alters this
proportion? This would be the cohort effect. Is it something that affects all of the
universe in the selected time interval, irrespective of age or cohort? This would be
the period effect.
The Age-Period-Cohort (APC) model decomposes the evolution of a variable
into three parts: one that is a function of age (or duration, i.e., time since system-
entry), another that is a function of the time period (the moment at which the data is
observed) and finally, one that is a function of the cohort (the set of individuals that
entered the system at the same time). There is also a residual part that cannot be
decomposed since it is a function of age, period, and cohort effects.
This type of model has been widely used in fields such as epidemiology in life
sciences and life-cycle behaviour in economics. To our knowledge, the only study
that applies this methodology to the subject of living arrangements is Mason and
Lee (2004).
We use the following general APC model:
wijk ¼ l þ ai
DAge þ bj
DPeriod þ ck
DCohort þ eijk
ð1Þ
Wijk represents the dependent variable; l is the overall mean; ai represents the
effects of age; DAge are the age dummies; bj represents the effects of time period;
DPeriod are the period dummies; ck represents the cohort effects; DCohort are the
cohort dummies; eijk is a normally distributed error term.
It is well known that the above equation is not estimable, since it is possible to
derive one of the variables from the other two. For example, Age = Period––Cohort
(birth year). As this perfect linear relationship exists between the three effects, they
cannot be separately estimated.
There are several alternatives that provide a solution to the identification
problem.
It is possible to consider a priori that one of the effects is unimportant, and
eliminate it. Another possibility is to set constraints to the parameters to be
estimated. The choice of constraint must be made with care and several approaches
have been proposed in the literature. See, for instance, Robertson and Boyle (1998).
The most popular approach is the one of Deaton and Paxson (1994). Setting
constraints is a dangerous practice, since constraints that do not appear to differ
greatly may produce very different age, period and cohort effects (Mason and
Wolfinger 2001). Yet another alternative is to replace one of the effects with one

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 279

variable or a function of variables that reflects the underlying process thought to be

present in the considered effect. (Fienberg and Mason 1979). The choice of this
(these) variable(s) must be logical.
This paper follows the last alternative, in view of our consideration that it is the
one that is best able to improve our understanding of the process underlying the
evolution of the variable. The effect that we replace by variables is the period effect.
The four dependent variables used in the analysis are pnuc (the proportion of
nuclear households), psingle (the proportion of single-person households), pnucHP
(the proportion of individuals with health problems living in nuclear households)
and pnucNHP (the proportion of individuals with no health problems living in
nuclear households).
The choice of the variable(s) used to identify the period effect is decisive to the
correct interpretation of the other two effects. The potential influence such
variable(s) may exert on the option to live in external or nuclear households must
affect all cohorts and people of all ages. We experiment with five possible
representatives for the period effect: the per-capita real income, the variation in the
price index of ‘‘Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels’’, the variation in the
all-item consumer price index, the unemployment rate and the capacity of
institutions for the elderly.
Empirical studies have established a relationship between the level of income of
the family members and the chosen living arrangement (Kotlikoff and Morris 1990;
Boersch-Supan et al. 1988; Bethencourt and Rı́os-Rull 2004). They find a positive
influence of the income level on the probability of the old person living alone.
Possible explanations are the preference for ‘‘intimacy at a distance’’ with the
affordability of formal home care, which allows parents to age in their own home, or
the higher opportunity cost of restricting the supply of working hours for the
children with higher income levels. Hence, in times of higher per-capita real income
levels, it is feasible to expect a larger proportion of nuclear households.
As pointed out in the introduction to this paper, the decision to live in an
extended household may have an economic motivation. By sharing accommodation,
each individual is able to reduce spending on certain items, namely housing and
energy costs. Therefore, times of higher growth in this category of costs could
motivate an increase in the proportion of extended households.
The effect on living arrangements of the rise in prices of items other than housing
and energy costs justifies the inclusion of the all-item consumer price index. If
home-sharing imposes a financial burden asymmetrically on one of the generations,
generalised rising costs may hinder the formation of extended households.
As a motive for delayed departure from the parental nest, unemployment may be
associated with a lower proportion of nuclear households.
The availability of places in institutions for the elderly may determine the form of
an alternative living arrangement for those elderly who cannot live alone. Larger
capacity of these institutions probably induces a reduction in the number of
extended households. However, institutions may also be the chosen alternative of
those elderly individuals who would otherwise be alone, this in turn implying a
decrease in the nuclear household segment. Therefore, although the capacity of

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institutions for the elderly is probably a factor that is of some relevance to the choice
of living arrangement, its expected net effect is not obvious.
The models that we estimate are, therefore, the following:
pnucik ¼ l1 þ a1i
DAge þ c1k
DCohort þ d1
Periodkþi þ e1ik
ð2Þ
psingleik ¼ l2 þ a2i
DAge þ c2k
DCohort þ d2
Periodkþi þ e2ik
ð3Þ
pnucHPik ¼ l3 þ a3i
DAge þ c3k
DCohort þ d3
Periodkþi þ e3ik
ð4Þ
Age Cohort
pnucNHPik ¼ l4 þ a4i
D þ c4k
D þ d4
Periodkþi þ e4ik
ð5Þ
pnucik is the proportion of individuals aged i, from the cohort born in year k, that
live in a nuclear household.
psingleik is the proportion of individuals aged i, from the cohort born in year k,
who form single-person households.
pnucHPik is the proportion of individuals aged i, from the cohort born in year k,
with health problems, living in nuclear households.
pnucNHPik is the proportion of individuals aged i, from the cohort born in year k,
with no health problems, living in nuclear households.
Period represents one of the above presented variables used to identify the period
effect, or a combination of several of them, as many variations in the models were
tested.
We consider that the effects are fixed (in the sense that they are not variable).
If, for example, different cohorts aged differently, there should be an interaction
between age and cohort effects.
We do not consider interaction of the different effects for several reasons. First,
the span of time is not sufficiently long to expect important interactions. Second,
one of the criteria in the modelling is parsimony. Third, as explained in Rodgers
(1982), the inclusion of interactive effects exacerbates the basic problem of non-
estimability of the effects.

The Results

Since the data consists of proportions, the straight use of OLS could lead to
inconsistent results, such as proportions larger than one or less than zero. At least
two estimating methodologies attempt to solve the problem. One follows a
suggestion in Green et al. (1977) and consists of estimating the models using
weighted least squares after applying the logistic transformation to the proportions
data. The other is the fractional logit proposed by Papke and Wooldridge (1996),
which, as a quasi-maximum likelihood method rather than a least squares method,
admittedly estimates the models’ parameters with greater efficiency. Therefore, the
latter is chosen.
The results of the estimations are presented in Table 2. All the calculations were
carried out with software Stata 9. The P-values are based on robust standard errors.
The models for psingle and for pnucHP are presented with the exclusion of the
variable used to express the period effect, since the corresponding parameter was
not statistically significant and Wald tests confirm that the simpler model does not

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 281

Table 2 Fractional logit estimation results

Pnuc coef. P-value Psingle coef. P-value PnucHP coef. P-value PnucNHP coef. P-value

1911 0,476 0,000 0,716 0,000 -1,299 0,000 1,994 0,000

1912 0,155 0,199 -0,339 0,000 -1,144 0,000 1,003 0,004
1913 0,175 0,120 0,263 0,015 -1,192 0,000 1,090 0,000
1914 -0,255 0,065 -0,158 0,274 -1,523 0,000 0,552 0,045
1915 0,439 0,002 0,628 0,000 -1,223 0,000 1,764 0,000
1916 -0,147 0,353 -0,078 0,496 -1,387 0,000 0,664 0,094
1917 0,405 0,015 -0,342 0,018 -1,308 0,000 1,943 0,000
1918 -0,578 0,006 -0,178 0,121 -1,984 0,000 1,106 0,012
1919 -0,247 0,321 0,004 0,971 -0,913 0,000 0,704 0,075
1920 -0,118 0,550 0,438 0,000 -1,659 0,000 1,459 0,000
1921 -0,086 0,679 -0,336 0,005 -1,612 0,000 1,516 0,000
1922 -0,220 0,290 0,234 0,066 -1,756 0,000 1,405 0,001
1923 -0,201 0,389 -0,154 0,214 -1,383 0,000 1,013 0,019
1924 -0,213 0,345 0,407 0,002 -1,811 0,000 1,403 0,001
1925 -0,702 0,003 -0,064 0,666 -2,215 0,000 0,870 0,046
1926 0,254 0,273 -0,150 0,313 -1,102 0,000 1,674 0,000
1927 -0,261 0,272 -1,033 0,000 -2,053 0,000 1,602 0,000
1928 -0,453 0,062 -0,001 0,996 -1,746 0,000 1,003 0,029
1929 -0,536 0,031 -0,314 0,062 -2,196 0,000 1,178 0,013
1930 -0,803 0,002 -0,912 0,000 -2,334 0,000 0,806 0,092
1931 -0,865 0,001 -0,621 0,001 -2,456 0,000 0,821 0,096
1932 -0,609 0,021 0,042 0,817 -2,415 0,000 1,309 0,013
1933 -0,253 0,343 0,480 0,002 -2,103 0,000 1,687 0,001
1934 -1,110 0,000 -0,007 0,975 -3,240 0,000 1,048 0,038
1935 -1,740 0,000 -1,087 0,000 -3,704 0,000 0,254 0,611
1936 -1,139 0,000 -0,926 0,000 -3,218 0,000 1,027 0,034
66 -0,075 0,203 0,172 0,131 0,089 0,298 -0,231 0,012
67 -0,171 0,010 0,215 0,152 -0,126 0,103 -0,200 0,023
68 -0,221 0,001 0,326 0,005 -0,276 0,006 -0,157 0,154
69 -0,275 0,000 0,330 0,007 -0,357 0,006 -0,171 0,232
70 -0,277 0,000 0,369 0,004 -0,437 0,000 -0,096 0,431
71 -0,292 0,000 0,371 0,004 -0,320 0,001 -0,179 0,144
72 -0,270 0,002 0,484 0,001 -0,461 0,000 -0,017 0,898
73 -0,328 0,000 0,604 0,000 -0,621 0,000 0,050 0,706
74 -0,254 0,017 0,721 0,000 -0,508 0,000 0,034 0,814
75 -0,142 0,244 0,731 0,000 -0,372 0,004 0,110 0,573
76 -0,269 0,007 0,773 0,000 -0,571 0,000 0,066 0,682
77 -0,305 0,040 0,864 0,000 -0,680 0,000 0,143 0,484
78 -0,324 0,022 0,990 0,000 -0,648 0,000 0,149 0,518
79 -0,472 0,002 1,022 0,000 -0,839 0,000 0,152 0,496
80 -0,427 0,004 1,080 0,000 -0,835 0,000 0,205 0,422

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282 P. C. Albuquerque

Table 2 continued

Pnuc coef. P-value Psingle coef. P-value PnucHP coef. P-value PnucNHP coef. P-value

81 -0,634 0,000 1,048 0,000 -1,120 0,000 0,128 0,642

82 -1,068 0,000 1,146 0,000 -1,090 0,000 -0,098 0,762
83 -0,818 0,001 1,104 0,000 -0,966 0,000 -0,234 0,530
84 -0,950 0,000 1,386 0,000 -1,337 0,000 -0,146 0,740
CPI 0,061 0,003 – – – – 0,132 0,000
Const 0,970 0,002 -1,994 0,000 2,855 0,000 -1,033 0,074

Note: P-values based on robust standard errors

Table 3 Wald tests

H0: Insignificant cohort effects H0: Insignificant age effects
2
v (26) P-value v2(19) P-value

Pnuc 2525,56 0,000 52,01 0,000

Psingle 1361,64 0,000 141,65 0,000
PnucHP 1550,13 0,000 77,77 0,000
PnucNHP 1180,61 0,000 35,54 0,012

fit worse than the others. Cohort effects as a whole and age effects as a whole are
very significant in any of the selected models, as shown in Table 3.
The marginal effects correspond to the Age and Cohort effects that we wish to
identify. They are presented in Table 4 and are plotted in Charts 5–7. When looking
at the age effects, zero corresponds to the level of age 65, and when referring to the
cohort effects, the reference category is the level of the cohort 1910.
We find that it is particularly after age 80 that individuals live more in extended
households. The proportions of extended households largely increase with age after
that. With one or two exceptions, the youngest cohorts tend to live more in extended
households than the previous cohorts, especially after the cohort born in 1926.
The period effect is positive and significant. Times of higher living costs coincide
with times of larger proportions of nuclear households. One possible explanation is
that when two generations share the same home, one of them is asymmetrically
burdened with the living expenses, which makes the sharing of accommodation
more difficult when inflation is higher. Another possible explanation is that the cost
of institutional care also rises and that some of those who would otherwise enter
institutions can no longer afford to do so and therefore, remain in their own homes.
The proportion of single-person households (single) in the population aged 65+
has decreased only slightly. As the proportion of nuclear households has decreased
more, this means that the singles have been growing as a proportion of the nuclears.
On average, they account for approximately 30% of the nuclear households.
The proportion of single increases monotonically with age, and we do not find the
decrease after age 80 that we find for the nuclear as a whole. Therefore, such a
reduction in the proportion of nuclears is due to a very large reduction in households

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 283

Table 4 Cohort and age effects

Pnuc Psingle PnucHP PnucNHP

Cohort effects
1911 0,103 0,135 -0,313 0,286
1912 0,035 -0,048 -0,278 0,187
1913 0,040 0,044 -0,289 0,200
1914 -0,061 -0,023 -0,361 0,114
1915 0,096 0,115 -0,296 0,276
1916 -0,035 -0,012 -0,333 0,135
1917 0,089 -0,048 -0,316 0,295
1918 -0,141 -0,026 -0,447 0,205
1919 -0,059 0,001 -0,224 0,142
1920 -0,028 0,077 -0,388 0,249
1921 -0,020 -0,048 -0,379 0,255
1922 -0,053 0,039 -0,407 0,242
1923 -0,048 -0,023 -0,332 0,191
1924 -0,051 0,071 -0,417 0,242
1925 -0,172 -0,010 -0,483 0,170
1926 0,057 -0,022 -0,269 0,271
1927 -0,062 -0,119 -0,458 0,264
1928 -0,110 0,000 -0,405 0,190
1929 -0,131 -0,045 -0,480 0,214
1930 -0,197 -0,109 -0,498 0,159
1931 -0,212 -0,081 -0,512 0,161
1932 -0,149 0,007 -0,506 0,228
1933 -0,060 0,085 -0,462 0,266
1934 -0,271 -0,001 -0,576 0,193
1935 -0,401 -0,120 -0,597 0,055
1936 -0,277 -0,107 -0,568 0,189
Age effects
66 -0,018 0,028 0,020 -0,054
67 -0,041 0,036 -0,030 -0,047
68 -0,053 0,055 -0,066 -0,037
69 -0,066 0,056 -0,086 -0,040
70 -0,066 0,064 -0,106 -0,022
71 -0,070 0,064 -0,077 -0,042
72 -0,065 0,086 -0,112 -0,004
73 -0,079 0,110 -0,152 0,011
74 -0,061 0,135 -0,124 0,008
75 -0,034 0,137 -0,090 0,025
76 -0,064 0,146 -0,139 0,015
77 -0,073 0,166 -0,167 0,032
78 -0,078 0,195 -0,159 0,033
79 -0,115 0,202 -0,206 0,034

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284 P. C. Albuquerque

Table 4 continued

Pnuc Psingle PnucHP PnucNHP

80 -0,103 0,216 -0,205 0,045

81 -0,155 0,208 -0,273 0,029
82 -0,261 0,232 -0,266 -0,023
83 -0,200 0,222 -0,237 -0,055
84 -0,232 0,290 -0,322 -0,034

Chart 5 Age and cohort effects in the proportion of nuclear households

with couples or with a parent and a child under 26. This, in turn, is easily explainable
by the combination of widowhood with the departure of adult children from the
parental home, which is all too likely to occur to individuals after the age of 80.

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 285

Chart 6 Age and cohort effects in the proportion of individuals with/without health problems in nuclear
households

Although quite irregular, the cohort effect shows a somewhat smaller propensity
of younger cohorts to live in single households. There is no period effect, which is
not unreasonable considering that the data covers only eight years.
Distinguishing between individuals with and without health problems, those with
health problems have a more pronounced age effect, which is understandable. Those
with no health problems live more in extended households only after age 80. For
those with no health problems, there has not been a cohort effect trend. It is quite
irregular. The youngest cohorts that tend to live more in extended households,
especially those born after 1926, are those with health problems. The period effect is
only significant (and again positive) for those with no health problems.
In order to discover whether there is a significant difference in the number of
individuals living alone in the groups of healthy and unhealthy elderly, we use
the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z, which does not assume normal distributions of the

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286 P. C. Albuquerque

Chart 7 Age and cohort effects in the proportion of one person households

variables (which the proportion of isolated individuals would not satisfy). The result
indicates that distributions of the two groups are not significantly different from
each other (probability of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z statistic = 0,164).

The Projection

In this section, the estimated model is used to project the proportion of nuclear
households for the elderly in general and for the single households. The projections
do not go into the future since they are based on data from only 8 years.
We adopt a two-step procedure to forecast the evolution of the living
arrangements of the elderly living in the community in Portugal. First, we project
the proportion of nuclear households for each age class. Next, we compute the
weighted averages of these proportions for each year, using as weights the

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The Elderly and the Extended Household in Portugal 287

proportion of the population in each age category that is projected by the Portuguese
National Institute of Statistics for the respective year. Thus, we establish the
forecasts of the average proportions of nuclear households with elderly in Portugal.
A similar procedure to this can be found in Rentz and Reynolds (1991).
There is one difficulty with this procedure: each year, a new cohort enters the age
group of 65 years, but there is no estimated cohort effect for this specific cohort.
Two solutions were tried: (1) to consider the coefficients for each new cohort to be
the same as that used for the last cohort, i.e., the coefficient for cohort 1936, p. 2) to
extrapolate the coefficients for each new cohort based on a linear trend. Since the
results are not very different, it is not important which of the solutions is chosen: the
message that is conveyed is the same for both solutions. The charts that are
presented correspond to the first solution.
As we use the fractional logit, the estimations made in the first step of the
procedure must be converted to proportions before the second step.
The results of the projections may be seen in Charts 1 and 2.
We can see that from 2001 to 2005, the proportion of nuclear households with
individuals aged 65+ and the proportion of single-person households kept
decreasing. The cohort effects are crucial to these results. Projections using the
models with no cohort effects would lead to considerably higher proportions of
nuclear households, particularly of single households.

Conclusions

This article has examined the living arrangements of individuals aged 65 and over
living in the community in Portugal since 1994.
In a southern European country like Portugal, typically identified with traditional
family orientations, extended households are expected to have an important weight.
Nevertheless, if the view that these countries are simply lagging behind in a
generalised process of individualisation is correct, we should expect decreasing
proportions of extended households, as well as increasing proportions of single-
person households.
We find that not only nuclear households in general but also single-person
households in particular have lost importance. Moreover, considering that only one
decade elapsed, the change is quite remarkable.
Despite the fact that more than half of the elderly (between 59% and 67% of
those living in the community) live in nuclear households, these proportions
decreased between 1994 and 2001, and have, on the whole, kept decreasing in the
ensuing years, according to our projections. Extended households are, therefore, a
very significant form of household when considering the elderly.
We find that in each cohort, it is above all the oldest old as a group that is
responsible for the increase in the proportion of extended households. Living
arrangement patterns for healthy and unhealthy individuals are very different,
indicating that health problems are a strong motive for old individuals to live in
extended households. Individuals with health problems start much earlier to live
more in extended households as they age than those with no health problems. Old

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individuals with no health problems live more in extended households only when
they become very old (after age 80).
The more recent cohorts reveal larger proportions of extended households,
implying that there is no evidence that this constitutes the remnants of a household
structure that is soon to disappear. Nevertheless, this trend towards acceptance of, or
preference for, extended households is a characteristic of the elderly with health
problems. The new behaviour is the larger constitution of extended households that
include the elderly with health problems. This points to a prevalence of co-residence
triggered by needs on the part of the older generation, rather than the younger
generations.
Those living alone accounted for roughly 20% of the elderly in the beginning of
the period; this decreased to approximately 16% by 2001, and continued to
decrease, as indicated by our projections.
The proportion of individuals living alone increases in relation to rising age,
which is highly relevant to policy considerations, particularly when we do not find
that the proportion of single households is substantially larger among the healthy
than among the unhealthy.
Given the fact that we have no access to data on institutionalised individuals, it is
possible that many of those who do not live in nuclear households are institutiona-
lised, therefore reducing the total number of individuals in the community and
making the category of extended households appear larger. However, the result that
the extended household is not losing importance maintains, in fact, its validity.
The knowledge about the type of households is relevant for those interested in
studying the demand for housing, the demand for consumer goods, or the need for
formal care-providers. The increase in the proportion of extended households with
elderly may signal that larger houses are necessary and that even the houses for
younger generations should be designed to be ‘elderly-friendly’. The fact that it is
mostly the younger cohorts of the elderly with health problems who tend to live
more in extended households suggests that there may be a need for a larger number,
or a lower cost, of nursing homes and skilled home assistance. The decrease in the
proportion of single households may have several interpretations and implications.
It is possible that it reflects a lack of conditions for the elderly to live alone, causing
them to move to extended households or to institutions. In this case, it indicates that
more formal care addressed to the elderly who live alone is required. It may also be
a signal that the importance of kin care-providers is growing, and that their activity
deserves increased attention.
Our results are more a portrait of a situation than an explanation for what is
found. It would be of interest to pursue that direction in future research.

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