Episode 60: The Social Science of Living Alone with Dr. Jun Chu
AAmy BarnesSep 28, 2024 at 12:05 am30min
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00:04Dr. Ian Anson
Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC.
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00:15Dr. Ian Anson
On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting, speakers and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.
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00:41Dr. Ian Anson
It's September here at UMBC, and the campus is alive with excitement and fun as students cross the quads with their backpacks full of notes and reading. You know, I recall that same sense of excitement when arriving at UNC's campus a decade and a half ago, totally bewildered by and eager for all the possibilities. I lived on campus, so this feeling was 24/7. And you know, one thing that more modern college students may not be able to comprehend is that my first year dorm had no air conditioning. Yeah, you can imagine how much more intense all the feelings were when accompanied by the heat and humidity of late August in North Carolina. But another feature of living in the first year dorms was that I was randomly assigned a roommate. My roommate, whose name I won't disclose, was a total stranger to me in the first year, though, we got to know each other well over the time we spent living together. He ended up going to medical school and is now a practicing physician. So I like to think that there were some good vibes emanating from that oven-like dorm room after all, in this case, UNC forced us to live together, which ended up being great for both of us. But I wonder what it would have been like if, instead of the camaraderie of my hardworking roommate, I had sweated it out in my first year dorm room, alone. Living alone is a relatively common phenomenon that bears some very important social consequences. To unpack the process of aging while living alone, I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Jun Chu to the podcast. Dr Chu is an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Public Health here at UMBC. Jun conducts research in the intersection of health policy and immigrants in the United States. His other research interests include patients and caregivers of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia, access and utilization of primary care services in the US, and quantitative research methods. Let's hear what Dr. Chu has to say about the social science of living alone, right now.
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02:40Dr. Ian Anson
So today I am delighted to welcome to the program, Dr. Jun Chu, who is here to tell us a little bit about the social science of living alone as an aging adult. And I got to say, Dr. Chu, I'm really interested in this topic. I think many of our listeners are going to be super interested in this, especially because we've done some episodes in the past on some of the difficulties and the complexities of aging. But I wanted to ask you, first of all, just what are some of these challenges associated with living alone as an aging adult? And, you know, I can imagine that there's probably some challenges associated with, like, you know, if you've got, like, a really heavy sofa that you got to move, you got to find somebody to do it, or, like, if you've got a bunch of laundry, but obviously this, there's a lot more to it. So again, thanks for being on the program and tell us about this lifestyle.
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03:23Dr. Jun Chu
Sure you can just call me Jun. Thanks so much for having me. So that's a great question. So living alone we think of like a grandma/grandpa living in their own retirement home. That's not really living alone in the sense that somebody's truly living alone. Living alone is really like you're seeing your next door neighbor has nobody to visit, has no one to come to their house ever, he or she going in and out her house. And it's getting like you can see the sadness and this and that. You're 100% correct, the physical movement of things, or labor intensive jobs such as doing laundry, fixing a car, cutting trees, that can be a major burden. However, when we tend to think of living alone, they probably had a system figured out. Because not that's not their first day living alone. What is really becoming difficult is when they become sick. Even when they become sick, they also have a system. Oh, maybe the neighbor will come to take care of them. Maybe someone else is coming there, but for the most part, unless the person is going through trouble, or, you know, bailed out, or on the other side is the getting sick part, uh, living alone has been a life choice of a lot of individuals for years. But you're but you're correct physical and I think in addition to that, is the getting sick part.
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04:40Dr. Ian Anson
Yeah, that's a really interesting observation that you're right, that people aren't just, you know, becoming very old and living alone kind of suddenly, right? They're developing these kind of long term patterns of of lifestyle choices that allow them to kind of get by. I think that's a really interesting thing. So, so how is it that people get into this situation though? Is this something that will just kind of coalesce and again, I also want to ask you more about this idea that they really don't have anybody. Is that really the case for most of these people, or is it like they maybe have somebody visit them occasionally? I mean, this seems like a pretty, pretty hard lifestyle.
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