Leaving Home in Late Life: Voluntary Housing Transitions of Older Adults as Gift Giving Practices in the Midwestern United States.

Abstract

This ethnographic network study investigates the processes of household disbandment and decision-making of older adults in the Midwestern United States relocating in post-Global Financial Crisis contexts. Interviews, participant observation and document review were conducted with over 75 older adults, their kin and involved professionals moving from January 2009 until May 2012. Stages observed were pre-move planning, move in-process, and post-move adjustment. Study participants moved to Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs), senior housing, condos and homes. This study utilized approaches from cultural and linguistic anthropology to analyze relocation. Discourses of accessibility, mobility and activities of daily living often frame relocation studies. This dissertation offers gift-giving as the rationale for moving. While gifts may be transfers of property and assets, this dissertation examines a processual gift. Drawing on literatures on relocation and transitions, (Litwak and Longino, 1987; Wiseman, 1980; Turner, 1967; Van Gennep, 1909) and gift-giving (Mauss, 1925/1990), this interdisciplinary project primarily finds that 1) older adults view moves in terms of gifts to themselves, their partners and their kin. Evidence includes why moving is considered e.g. disease diagnosis, how these gifts are given, barriers to completing the gift of moving, and related obligations, complications and anxieties. Findings also include 2) the personalization practices of older adults contributing to the “circulation” (Appadurai, 1986) of senior housing as modifiable physical entities, 3) alternatives gifts can be made if relocation is not completed and 4) post-move adjustments. Lastly, this project applies Baltes and Baltes (1990) gerontological theory of strategic functioning, i.e. the Selection, Optimization with Compensation (SOC) model, to living in a less demanding environment suggesting that 5) optimization can be extended to network members. Older adults may also experience optimization by increasing peer and kin contact and preparing for current and future health concerns. By examining how older persons and their support network negotiate moves, this study identifies ways for social workers to support for older adults relocating at a practice and policy level. This study also analyzes the situated impact of the Global Financial Crisis and the intersections of relocation with gift-giving, material culture and kinship for of older Americans.