Race and the Living Arrangements of Elderly Brazilians 1970-1998

Susan De Vos, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Flavia Andrade, University of Wisconsin at Madison

The purpose of this study is to trace trends in the living arrangements of elderly Brazilians between 1980 and 1995 by race, to speculate why those trends appear to be different, and to test the hypothesis that such demographic characteristics as age, sex and marital status, can help explain the differences that we see. The 1970 census did not collect information on race. The 1998 PNAD collected information on race, but not on marital status. Otherwise, we could have viewed a longer time frame. We will find for the 1980-1995 period anyway that although there are marked demographic differences, they cannot account for some of the large disparity in type of living between the races. Socioeconomic and/or cultural reasons need exploration. We use a mixture of census and PNAD data, and use the demographic technique of standardization on a multinomial variable with multivariate statistical techniques.