| Over the last two decades the United States has experienced considerable economic and social change. These changes have had a profound effect upon the way people organize their survival or reproduction strategies, especially after retirement from the labor force. This project deals with the strategies elderly households use to maintain their livelihood or well-being during their retirement years. An elderly person's well-being depends to a large extent on the success of participation in the labor force prior to retirement, and how they use the "bonanza of time" purported to come in the absence of employment. One purpose of this project is to ascertain how this extra time is used in the livelihood strategies of elderly households. Another purpose is to examine how elderly households balance the expenditure of time and money. Is money expended, on the one hand, to "purchase" time to do other things while, on the other hand, is time exchanged for goods and services that may no longer be affordable? These questions are answered in the framework of a three-way division of the economy: the household sphere of self-provisioning; the use of the informal sphere of family and friendship networks; and the formal sphere of business professionals. Elderly households are compared with households of other age groups. Households are also compared in terms of metropolitan-nonmetropolitan location, and in terms of economic status.;Using a mail survey, enhanced by face-to-face interviews, data was collected on 467 rural and urban households. Comparison of means and regression analysis was used to determine the level of participation in the three spheres. Major findings of the study show that age and income have a relatively strong effect on the livelihood strategies of Kansas households. |
