Older Adults Without Close Kin in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: We document the size and characteristics of the population of older adults without close kin in the contemporary United States. METHODS: Using the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the prevalence of lacking different types and combinations of living kin, examine how kinless-ness is changing across birth cohorts, and provide estimates of kinless-ness for sociodemographic and health groups. RESULTS: In 1998-2010, 6.6% of U.S. adults aged 55 and above lacked a living spouse and biological children and 1% lacked a partner/spouse, any children, biological siblings, and biological parents. Kinless-ness, defined both ways, is becoming more common among adults in their 50s and 60s for more recent birth cohorts. Lacking close kin is more prevalent among women than men, native born than immigrants, never-married, those living alone, college-educated women, those with low levels of wealth, and those in poor health. DISCUSSION: Kinless-ness should be of interest to policy makers because it is more common among those with social, economic and health risks; those who live alone, with low levels of wealth, and disability. Aging research should address the implications of kinless-ness for public health, social isolation, and the demand for institutional care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".