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. 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 you UMBC's social science community to you.
In recent months, we've had some great content on this podcast related to gerontology, or the study of aging populations. It's no wonder because UMBC has a fantastic program in gerontology that is only growing stronger each year. But a lot of folks still haven't caught up with the main message of the gerontologists it seems, because a lot of people don't understand that the world is very rapidly growing older. And no, I'm not talking about the Earth itself. The earth is quite old, in fact, and all of human history is just a blip compared to the processes that formed the great mountain ranges and coastlines of our contemporary world for instance. No, I'm talking about the observation that the number of young humans is soon going to be surpassed on a global scale by the number of older humans. And as we'll learn in today's feature interview, that is something that has quite simply never, ever happened.
As you can imagine, the consequences of an aging human population for the way that we all live are enormous. But while newcomers to these topics like me might immediately wonder whether we're facing a looming crisis. My guest today explains that the phenomenon is far more nuanced than it appears at first glance. And to tell the story of our aging societies, we have to look across the whole world to understand how different cultures grapple with life at an advanced age. As it turns out, even the basic nomenclature that we use to describe what happens and these later stages of life might need revision. All this to say I learned a lot from my recent interview with Dr. Christine Armstrong Maier, Associate Professor of Sociology and Gerontology, and Director of the UMBC Center for Health Equity and Aging. Dr. Mair also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health in the University of Maryland School of Medicine. I am delighted to bring you our conversation, which treats the topic of "kinlessness." I'm putting this in heavy quotation marks because as it turns out, it's not a great way to describe this phenomenon. Kinlessness and aging across the world. Let's listen in, right now.
All right, today, I am really delighted to welcome Dr. Christine Mair to the podcast. Uh, Dr. Mair, Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited to chat with you today.
Great. Thanks for having me.
So I want to jump right in because obviously the subject of today's podcast centers on your research. And I really want to think about the fact that in this research, and in the title of today's episode, it seems like we're talking about a problem, a pretty big problem, in fact, for elderly people, and I want to ask you, is this a problem? What is the problem that you identified in your research? And eo we have a way to solve it?
Yeah, great question. I think whenever we get into topics of aging and older adults and the expanding population, there's a couple of different approaches. One that's been happening for a while is this sort of catastrophizing about what's coming, because we know that there is going to be a massive increase in the older population, which I'll talk more about in a minute. But we've known that and scientists, social scientists have known that, scientists have known that for for decades and decades and decades. So there is always a tendency to catastrophize that and say, you know, what are we going to do? How are we going to address this? We're not prepared. All of that is true. However, we still have time to, one of the things I like to emphasize is we still have time, to put in interventions to address public policy changes, to put different types of support in, to change how we conceptualize aging and the needs of society before this becomes as catastrophic as it might not need to become. So that's one of the things I'm interested in thinking about with my work.
Yeah, so this problem of kinlessness. This is obviously the subject of today's episode, the subject of your research. And so you're looking at kinlessness across a variety of contexts. Tell me a little bit about the process that led to you doing this research. What, what sparked your interest in this? How did you come to the case selection, perhaps that (Dr. Mair: yeah) led you to study this in this way?
Right, well, my areas of focus in sociology were family, aging, and also global cross national research. So I was always interested in what's going on with aging populations across the globe. So one of the things that we're seeing that I learned early on when I was in school is that it's what really struck me and led me into this area is a couple of demographic changes are occurring. The first one and this is it's very rare that we get to say this, as you know, in social science at all. But we can absolutely say this, for the first time ever in human history, and likely irreversible, barring scopic apocalyptic conditions that obviously inevitably occur on on all planets, right? The people, the older adults on this planet will outnumber younger adults. That's never happened before in any human society, because it simply has never been possible before. So this is absolutely massive. This cannot be overstated in terms of the impact this is going to have on our everyday lives. And on our social support systems, on our families, especially women who will be doing a lot of caregiving for older adults. Men also who are increasingly involved in caregiving. But this in many ways is going to absolutely reshape the way we think about everything in terms of our family lives and our own lives and aging and the needs of our, the health needs of our society. So we really are not prepared for this at all. This transition occurs country by country at different speeds in different places. It occurred, it's already starting to occur. 2020 is the crossover point for the global population. So this kind of crossover point where the older adult population and the younger adult population are about equal proportions of the global population is right now. And then these trends are going to absolutely reverse, where we're going to see a massive increase in the slope, increasing the proportion and number of older people and continued declines in younger people across the globe. So in some of the richest countries, this transition has occurred a lot more slowly, it's occurred over 60 years, 80 years, 100 years. In some middle and lower income countries, one of the concerns is is going to happen very rapidly in 20 or 15 years, it will basically they'll have less time when this transition occurs to prepare and adjust. So this is something that's been very impactful. I studied archaeology and anthropology. So I know a lot about ancient societies, I'm really interested in human societies across all time. And this is something that really is absolutely unprecedented in the globe, and in our history as a species. So that is something that's important to study. At the same time part of what's driving this is we have people having fewer and fewer children. Fertility across all continents of the globe is falling and expected to continue to fall. So there's some really interesting projections, just looking out to 2100, year 2100 or 2060. And we do see it falling in all regions, even in regions that haven't had a lot of medical support for birth control. Still, we're seeing it fall, and it's expected to continue to fall. So we're seeing that there's fewer children, that's one of the reasons that trend is happening, better medical care to live longer across the globe, right, which is increasing the aging population. But it also means that we have a higher number of people who have no children, or maybe they only have one child and that child passes away. This is an issue in China, for example, from the one child policy, if that one child doesn't make it to, you know, the end of your life, then you are again childless, right. So when we have fewer children or no children, then this creates also a scenario that we've never seen before. I also became interested in this work because even though this term is used a lot the term kinless and kinlessness. I hate it and think it's a terrible term. I usually call it "so called kinless."It's a term that became really popular in demographic research. I always put it in quotes and try to add a disclaimer. We're actually, a colleague and I are trying to think of a better term for this right now like. Essentially, what we're saying is that they don't have a nuclear family. It's like a non nuclear family type scenario. It means that they do not have a partner because they've either been divorced or separated or widowed or never married, and they don't have children. It essentially means they don't have a nuclear family, that sort of standard North American family, right. But people have really diverse family, increasingly diverse family formulations of extended family, of friends as family, which can be some literatures call them fictive kin or framily, different things like that. And so traditional nuclear families, even older adults, they're not sitting alone in a room by themselves for their entire lives not interacting with anybody. That's just not the reality. However, our policies are completely designed and our health care policies around a standard North American nucular family. Sometimes there's room for extended family involvement, and of course extended families are particularly important among immigrants to the United States and minority groups who've had to rely on extended families, because nuclear families maybe weren't always an option historically, due to all the various historical institutions of slavery and things like that, that rip families apart from one another. So we see the extended family plays a big role, but it's really demographers were talking about this kinlessness and sort of painting this picture of these people that were alone, and, you know, this was a huge catastrophic disaster and it's a concern, but we have time to prepare and think about it. This group is growing just like the aging population is growing, and they have really diverse social ties, they have their own forms of support, or also if they don't, we need to be thinking about interventions to help encourage and put that in place. So all this kind of led me you know, these are sort of things that have been out there. I think one of the things I always tell my students is think about what frustrates you, or resonates with you when you are reading things. And if you find that you feel people, you know, might be painting a literature as a little, maybe two, one dimensional or two dimensional, you can add more to the story. So I think this group is really diverse. We know it is across the globe. And there's a lot of different things and options to sort of cater support and think about how to prepare for this growing group of people.
Dr. Mair, I gotta say, as someone who listens to a lot of sort of narratives about research through this podcast, and many of our longtime listeners have heard a lot of people talk about their research. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets me super excited. And hopefully, some of my listeners are agreeing with me, because I think that it really has so many components of exactly what we like to feature on this this podcast, because it's, it's a perceived problem, that a lot of people are very alarmist about, perhaps. We get into the social science, we can start to think about how it's much more nuanced than what you know, alarmists might immediately call into question. And it's really in studying the, you know, entire through line of the process, right, from the demographic challenge to how people are actually living, to the policy implications that we start to really unpack how to move forward. And so I just, I just totally love this. This is such a such a fascinating thing. And you're right, that I don't think a lot of people are thinking about this, because I certainly haven't thought about this before in that way. I was shocked to learn that we're we've already kind of past this, this moment, where globally, we're sort of similar densities in terms of younger and older people in the globe. I mean, that's really fascinating. I did not realize that was happening right now (Dr. Mair: Most people don't).
Right, right. I mean, it's, it's incredible. And just to think about the fact that so these these kinds of prescriptions and these kinds of policy recommendations, this is not stuff that we need to be thinking about 30, 40, 50 years. This is stuff we need to be thinking about today or yesterday, even in countries that vary across a bunch of different characteristics, so I think it's also fascinating to think about the kind of, you know, income dimension, and the fact that we've got some countries that are, you know, highly developed countries, you know, OECD countries and countries that are in developmental modes that are different. Very different stories here, I'm sure. So I want to I want to unpack a little bit, the actual kind of studies that you're performing to address these problems, you know, in quotations or problems, opportunities, areas, for rethinking. So what are you actually doing in terms of the research? And especially, I'm interested in the comparative element of this, how are you comparing countries? What data are you using to form the basis of these comparisons?
Yeah, well, and the study of people that, you know, don't have partners or children, these nuclear families, it goes back, you know, decades. For example, there, they used to be known as "elder orphans" was a term that was often used in the literature. They don't use the term "elderly" in gerontology anymore at all. It paints people as being frail just because they're of an older age. And we see that healthy longevity is is increasing, people are living longer lives with sort of a healthy quality of life. There was a lot of work maybe in the 80s and 90s, a lot of qualitative work on people who might have been at that time characterized as "elder orphans." This term "kinless" wasn't as strong back then or just referring to you know, unpartnered or unmarried and childless, and there wasn't as much quantitative work on this. It wasn't necessarily highlighted. We've always had people that are looking at childlessness, or you know, marital disruption or being unpartnered, but putting these two things together in terms of thinking about it as a particular group of focus has been, you know, kind of waned in and out of focus. In let's see, probably around the year 2010 or so this became a bit more of a focus for demographers. And demographers use, of course, primarily quantitative data. There are a couple of really great studies that came out in big prominent journals, by some wonderful scholars a couple of which that are friends of mine, where they really documented some of the risks associated being this group. And so of course, we do find that in the United States, and people who don't have partners or don't have children, they might be more likely to be in poverty or have, you know, poor health and old age, different things like that. But this was sort of these kind of just sort of basic national profiles. And I think the the details, as you were mentioning, is a lot more nuanced than that. So there's been more of an explosion, like I said, of kind of looking country by country. What we've been doing with a number of different projects is we've got a lot of papers that are out there doing these sort of national profiles and looking at health outcomes and things in a single country. But my team and I have always thought there's a lot more, the devils in the details on this, for example, and finally, there's some more data available to really be able to test this. So there's a study in the United States called the Health and Retirement Study. And what they've done is created sister studies across the globe in over 30 different countries. So they replicated studies of older adults, people aged 50 or older in some countries, 60 year older and they've been replicating this basic study from the United States across all these other different regions. Now, it's not inclusive of the globe because at the low income countries, it takes a lot of money to have a survey like this. So we've got some big gaps in knowledge in some of our most needed areas. But these studies were being collected, and then probably around maybe, I think it was 2015 or so, a group out of University of Southern California got a grant to create a database that helps link these up more carefully. So I used the US survey and the European survey in my dissertation work, and was working on linking up some of these, but thank goodness, they got this big grant to create this massive database that offers code to help us link it up, guidance, surveys. It's called the Gateway to Global Aging. I'll include the link when we when we talk about it. So it has data on it's not ideal for studying social networks, necessarily,. The European study has a lot more. But it's a massive, massive effort across all these different countries, we can at least look at their partnership status, their their family status. And we've been working to kind of test some of these assumptions. Like we were saying before, there's a sort of often a catastrophic narrative about this big boom in the aging population of this big group that won't have partners or children. But we wanted to see well, so there's often an assumption that they're going to be always worse off in all conditions, right. And this is something we really wanted to test empirically. And it had no,t has not been tested empirically across a wide range of countries, and that's one of the goals of my research is to really document that. So we're finding that a lot of sort of family based assumptions that people have about I think that family based models dominate our way of thinking about older adults. Our healthcare procedures designed that there'll be somebody there to help implement this care at home, and it's just simply not the case for everybody. So you know, there's a big assumption that living with children is beneficial to you when you're an older adult. that living with your child is really important. But this is a very, very cultural phenomenon. And in some countries, it's not something that the older adult wants to do, especially in Northern and Western Europe, and sometimes in the United States. In some regions of the globe, it's absolutely normative and it's what the older adult desires. In other countries, they only do it if they financially have to, or have to because of health declines. And so it's not their first choice, it's not something that makes them happy to have to do right. Other things that we see is that people will prefer that the family care for older people. I see a lot of variety across the globe, that people you know, a lot of people want more government support, they might want more private options. Maybe they don't want their children giving them their most intimate kind of care as they age and become vulnerable. They'd actually rather pay a staff person or somebody, you know, a medical professional to do that for them, rather than have their child do that work. So that's not something that's universal across the globe, we find that there's a lot of assumptions that people who don't have children are in poorer health. We find a lot of variation across the globe. Sometimes people without children have better health. There's a lot of economic strain associated with having children and sometimes psychological strain. Sometimes we find it's more economically privileged groups that don't have children in certain countries. Another one we looked at recently was looking at loneliness during COVID. We did not find that so called "kinless" older adults were more lonely during COVID than anybody else.
Wow.
Right. And that's what my favorite ones. That's one of our recent papers. I mean, you think about it, they're a lot, they're a lot more used to being alone. Right? So these kinds of disruptions were suddenly you can't, you know, see people and you don't you know, it's not as much it, maybe that's one of our hypotheses. Maybe it's less of a disruption for them. What we really found is that it was being unpartnered. So the so called "kinless" group, who was both unpartnered and childless, looked identical to the unpartnered group with children. So there was no essentially added loneliness risk of being both on partnered and childless. The risk of loneliness was really related to being unpartnered. So in that way, right, a partnership is really good for mental health and physical health, there's a lot of documented evidence of that. And that tends to be sometimes a bigger risk factor than whether or not somebody is like truly "kinless." And we're also looking at a couple other studies looking at people's end of life experiences. So I have a collaborator at Hopkins who studies end of life. She's in the School of Nursing, and what we're interested in looking at as well, if you take this group that does not have partners or children, how do they how did their last, you know, 30-60 days of life compared to somebody who does? Do we see that they have more intensive medical end of life experiences? Do we see that they have difficulty meeting their sort of wishes in terms of the last days of death and sort of location of death and things like that. And we're finding a lot of times it's other things that really predict this a little bit more than whether whether or not they have partners and children. There's a lot of cultural preferences about where people want to die. We've looked at this across 23 different countries. We looked at location of death and "kinlessness" to see whether people who were "kinless" were more likely to die in a hospital and less likely to die at home. And we really find just that it's really regional and cultural, far more than it is about family structure. So there's so much nuance to unpack here. And I think, you know, it's still a very new area quantitatively. And so the first days were very much about documenting big family, big profiles of risk, which is really crucial. These big demographic trends, but what I'm interested in is really getting into the cultural differences across countries, and really actually sort of testing all of these very heavily family based assumptions to see how many of them hold up empirically with cross national data. And there are a lot of surprises and it's very far from a you know, homogenous experience or outcome.
Wow, this is just so cool to think about how closely at the intersection, I guess this research is to so many different disciplines, realms of study, you know, from the economic dimension, thinking about these folks' economic profiles and how this relates, and obviously, these kinds of cultural preferences and the way that culture leads us to make a lot of sort of unconscious choices about these things, perhaps throughout the lifecycle that lead to these kinds of end of life outcomes, right. I mean, to the political. To the fact that you're bringing in now a health, for nursing. That's an incredible connection. I wanted to ask you on that note, right, what's next for this strand of research? Obviously, we've got these incredible cross national comparisons, we're finding out new things. Are there any kind of big studies on the horizon that you're planning, perhaps in collaboration with others?
Yeah. And I will say, you know, my, my, my terminal degree PhD is in sociology, but gerontology is also, we have a gerontology program, and a lot of us identify as gerontologists and that discipline is, by definition, interdisciplinary. So the field of gerontology includes people from medical sciences, School of Medicine, epidemiologists, public policy. Pretty much as you totally picked up on, discipline can really be involved in this because it's something that you really need to study from a number of different angles. So one of my goals has been to work with people from a variety of a variety of different disciplines to try to solve this problem, and also across the globe. So when we're studying, for example, collaborators, my sabbatical was was was traveling to sort of meet others that were working on this type of work across the globe. So if I'm working on a paper in Korea, I want to have a co author from Korea on that paper, to be able to understand the cultural context, right? Same thing with Latin America and the Caribbean. It's important, I think, very much when we're thinking about these big, complex global problems, to have an interdisciplinary team and an international team. And that's been sort of my, my goal in the last few years is to try to put that together. So we're now, one of my teams that I work with this is in Chile, and they're helping to link up some of the data on this in collaboration with myself and people at Hopkins and I've been in Poland and Italy, different collaborators there, and China, and Australia and Singapore. So it needs to be an international and interdisciplinary effort. So the next plan, I think one of the things I really want to do, in addition to documenting some of this with people who who understand each of these countries and understand their home countries, and all the needs is, is to think about some better way, a better way to frame this sort of term. So I was invited to travel out to the National University of Singapore in January, one of my collaborators is there. And she and I are going to focus on a number of new papers, really trying to think about what term is better besides "kinless." And she's doing a study of childless and "kinless" in Singapore, and she's also from Thailand, so we're going to plant a number of different projects, kind of comparing across a couple of different regions, and trying to figure out the Gateway to Global Aging has a number of these wonderful datasets, but you know, are there others that might give us more details into their family relationships that these datasets don't capture. And one of my biggest goals is to essentially lobby for the Gateway to Global Aging data to include more inclusive measures of people's networks and family beyond just the nucular family. So that's when I gave this talk to the National Academy of Sciences, they were asking for information, and were, you know, the main point was like, we don't have the data yet, to understand this enough to make policy recommendations. We always experience a sort of cultural and, you know, empirical lag, especially with anything social science related, as you know. So we really need to essentially start with looking at what are 18 year olds doing right? And then we're going to understand better about what the needs are coming down the pipeline. Same thing with this group, I mean, we can we can start at the age of 50 and study them, and that's still helpful, but we need to start collecting data beyond the needs of their family in order to know what their needs are, so that we can actually make recommendations to people in policy. Right now we don't have that documented thoroughly enough to make the proper, to provide data for policymakers to really understand how to change this.
Wow. Well, I will say you're totally at home here with another data dork. Somebody who also has a great appreciation for the art and craft of good data collection. But yeah, this sounds amazing. I'm so grateful to hear about these collaborations. I totally agree with you that it's such an instrumental step in this research to partner in this way. And Dr. Mair, I'm so excited that you were able to share some details about this ongoing research, and I really hope that in the near future, you will succeed in being able to make those policy recommendations because they seem from an outsider's perspective, pretty darn important. So thank you, again, so much for sharing about this. I have one question before we let you go. And that is if you have any advice for students. We have a lot of student listeners, obviously, who are tuning in, and they might be thinking about perhaps gerontology even as a field that really, as we've talked about, integrates insights from a variety of different social science disciplines. If students with that persuasion would be interested in maybe going pro in that field or in adjacent field, what advice would you give them?
Yeah, I think that's a great question. One thing that I think is maybe you're also familiar with this, the students they don't always realize is how much data is available public and free for them to have access to I use almost 100% only publicly available, free data. They might think, Oh, I don't know how to accomplish that. These websites now have wonderful ways that even a student who doesn't know how to do complex analysis can access this and start to look into topics and things that are of their interest. So I always build that into my classrooms and try to empower them to know how to work with data. And those who are interested in social science we actually have, so I'm the the newest director of our department center, which is the Center for Health Equity and Aging in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health. And we have a new program, this is going to be the second year of the program. It's called the Smart Scholars Program, student mentoring and research training program. And we bring in a cohort of 10 to 15 students, and teach them some of the basics of social science research that are not taught in the classroom. Data management, how to do some basic management of literature, grants, qualitative and quantitative data, some of the more slightly common sense things that maybe there's not time to do in the classroom, to give them this sort of really practical, very applied social science methodology skills that they can they then have on their resume, they can work on faculty projects after that, and be sort of empowered to be able to jump into research a bit more.
When I was a student where was that?
This winter, it's it's the new cohort starts in the summer. So we're going to have applicate, you know, put looking for applications this spring. So we'll definitely be blasting things out as soon as that's ready for Cohort Two.
Awesome. Well, that is certainly some very practical advice for students who are interested in this. I can't overstate how valuable that experience must be for students who are interested in careers in social sciences. Dr. Christine Mair, thank you so much for joining us today. This was fascinating. I really enjoyed getting to hear about your research, and all the best as you continue to work on this. Hopefully, we'll get some great policy recommendations coming out of your, your collaborators and your research in a very short while.
Thank you, hopefully, we'll just get more data, more data, more data.
Now it's time for Campus Connections, the part of the podcast where we connect today's featured content to other work happening at UMBC. And today, I'm joined once again by our production assistant, Jean Kim, who has another fascinating connection for us to think about. Jean, what else is going on in the study of aging at UMBC?
Hey, Dr. Anson, for this Campus Connection, we're going to look at the work of a past guest of the show Dr. Takashi Yamashita, a Professor of sociology and faculty in the UMBC Gerontology PhD program. Recently, Dr. Yamashita published an article titled. "Age, Period and Cohort Effects on Adult Literacy Skills in the United States" in the Adult Literacy Education research journal with co authors Thomas Smith of Northern Illinois University and Phyllis Cummins of Miami University. The article discusses that although adult literacy skills are critical assets of individual and societal well being both economically and socially, there is a lack of study in temporal sources of adult literacy skill variation. The study's objective was to document current trends of adult literacy skills and examine potential temporal sources of literacy skill variation by analyzing three nationally representative data sets from 1994 to 2017. The findings revealed a significant variation in adult literacy skills amongst different cohorts and time periods. Temporal sources like age, cohort, and period effects explain such variation. The study brings into discussion the social and economic conditions, and also the quality of education that contribute to these discrepancies. Both Dr. Mair and Dr. Yamashita shows us that aging is complex, and that a lot of factors, including social context and basic skills, go into helping ensure that older adults are able to live enriched and comfortable lives. And that's it for this week.
Thank you as always for making that great connection, Jean. And thanks to you for listening in. Hopefully like me, you gain an appreciation for the ways in which aging is complicated, multifaceted, and not nearly as bad or as scary as a lot of people make it out to be. Until next time, keep questioning.
Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our undergraduate production assistant is Jean Kim. Our theme music was composed by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience@umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 sponsored events. Until next time, keep questioning.
