The traditional focus of gerontological research on widowhood must be expanded to include divorce as another form of marital dissolution. Over 600,000 people aged 50 and older got divorced in 2010 but little is known about the predictors and consequences of divorces that occur during middle and later life.

We consider models that underlie two proposals to estimate nonparticipation bias. The first model posits a "continuum of resistance," placing people who were interviewed during the first contact on one end of the continuum and nonparticipants on the other. The second model assumes that there are different classes of nonparticipants and that similar classes can be found among participants; it then uses groups of participants thought to be like nonparticipants to estimate the characteristics of nonparticipants. We examine the justification for these models of the relationship between participants and nonparticipants and consider how well proposed methods based on these models describe nonparticipants and the impact of nonparticipation on survey estimates. The case we analyze is estimates of means of child support awards and payments in Wisconsin. We find that neither model is successful and that the versions of the methods we use do not detect the true extent of nonparticipation error in estimates based on the unadjusted sample mean. This failure occurs both for an external measure that is not contaminated with response errors and for self-reports. But response errors, which are not considered in the models we have found in the literature, substantially worsen matters.

Using data from the 2004 wave of the National Long-Term Care Survey, we examined how negative and positive caregiving experiences differ by caregivers’ gender and relationship to care recipients. We further considered how their caregiving experiences are affected by caregivers’ demographic characteristics, care recipients’ problem behavior and dependency, caregivers’ involvement, reciprocal help from care recipients, and social support available for caregivers. We found that female and adult-child caregivers, in general, reported having had more negative experiences than male and spouse caregivers, respectively. Wife caregivers were least likely to report positive experiences. We also found different risk factors for negative and positive caregiving experiences, and these factors varied depending on caregivers’ gender and relationship to the care recipient. The findings underscore the heterogeneity of caregiving experiences. To sustain informal care, state and local agencies need to tailor services to wife, husband, daughter, and son caregivers’ unique needs.

This paper examines the patterns and determinants of four types of support provided by adult children to their parents, with particular attention to differences in the helping behaviors of sons and daughters. The data come from the 1989 wave of the Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan. The analysis is based on 12,166 adult children from 2,527 families. We find that usually only one child in a family provides help with activities of daily living (ADLs) or instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), but for financial or material support the responsibility is likely to be shared among siblings. Sons generally carry the major responsibility for taking care of their older parents, and daughters fulfill the son's roles when sons are not available.

Later life marital dissolution increasingly occurs through divorce rather than widowhood, and divorce is more often followed by repartnership. The results from this study suggest that gerontological research should not solely focus on widowhood but also should pay attention to divorce and repartnering during later life.