Domestic Assistance For Elderly - Does Marriage Duration Matter?

 

The number of people falling in love with a domestic helper is increasing day by day. A lot of men are taking help of these kind of wives due to their increased presence and increasing earning power. But this trend has triggered several questions regarding the treatment accorded to such maids from the husbands. They are referred to as domestic assistance in Sydney for elderly who want to live on their own at home. But there are certain issues pertaining to their welfare which needs to be clarified.

First of all we have to see what causes the rise in the number of the elderly population. All across the developed nations, the proportion of the population above the age of sixty-five years is increasing substantially. This can be attributed to the increasing level of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in these nations. In addition, the number of the population suffering from the condition of obesity, stroke, heart diseases, arthritis and diabetes is also on the rise. All these factors have the common cause-decreasing aggregate-level covariates.

Aggregate-level covariates are those variables that are not strongly related to one another but exhibit statistically significant effects when analyzed individually. The concept of aggregates was first introduced in the field of statistics by Robert Weiler. Weiler's idea is based on the fact that each person in a community may be subjected to an external risk such as death or accident. When analyzed individually, the data may not reveal very many trends. This is how the concept of aggregation came into place-aggregates would act as a filter to show only those trends that are significant.

By aggregating the data provided by each study into separate bins for analysis, Weiler was able to show the existence and magnitude of the relationships between the various types of Covariates. The relationship between age and percentage points of marital disruption is easily spotted. The higher the marriage rate, the greater the propensity for the marriage to end, which in turn leads to a higher rate of marital disruption. Similarly, the effect of the foreign origin and the proportion of foreign born persons in the population on the propensity to experience domestic assistance for elderly is quite obvious. Older men are more likely to seek out assistance from a live-in care provider rather than a non-custodial parent

It was found that the strength of the relationship between the duration of the marriage and the tendency to seek assistance for elderly was negative and that there was no significant association between the duration of the marriage and the tendency to remain unmarried. This observation is contrary to results obtained by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). They found that there is a negative relationship between the duration of the marriage and the level of domestic assistance sought by the spouse. These findings are most consistent with models that assume that the husband is the sole provider of ame and that the wife has no other marital ties. The models that do not assume this are not consistent with the results obtained from the BLS.

A variety of potential explanations can be advanced to explain the inconsistent findings with respect to the marriage duration. One possibility is that the BLS data are flawed since it does not capture information about the financial aspects of the marriages. The other possibility is that the wives are underreporting the true cost of their husbands' marriage services because they do not perceive themselves as providers of ame. The third possibility is that wives overstate the extent of their service by a factor of two, which would result in a significant increase in their estimates of the costs of the marriage. While these three possibilities are possible, they are subject to alternative explanations. A key assumption that underlies many economic models of the role of marriage in mediating economic class differences is that remuneration varies with the level of economic development of an individual's society.

The present study addresses another important channel through which economic class differences may exert upward pressure on the costs of marriage and, by extension, the costs of domestic assistance for elderly. That is, through analysis of the earlier periods prior to the onset of the modern institutionalism in countries like Canada, the United States and Western Europe, it has been found that the prevalence and degree of spousal Dissolution was positively related to both the level of income of the parties and the duration of their marriage. Thus, the present period can be used to test the robustness of this relationship by investigating the role of marriage duration in mediating the relationship between income and the provision of household assistance for elderly. Surprisingly, the results suggest that the decline in marriage duration is negatively associated with income when controlling for several important economic variables.

Overall, the current study contributes to our understanding of the domestic assistance for elderly as it provides evidence on the effects of spousal dissolution on individual-level covariates of household income. Specifically, using a sample from the Canadian provinces during the early stages of the twenty-first century, this research finds that the length of marriage was negatively associated with both mean hours of work and hourly compensation (in adjusted proportions), but was not correlated with mean hours of work or compensation at the individual level. The findings are suggestive of the possibility that the role of spousal marriage in the provision of household assistance for elderly might vary across the generations. Further research is needed to directly test the implications of changes in marriage duration for household assistance for elderly policy.