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Throughout the world, marriages in which the husband is older than his wife are more common than same-age and women-older marriages. Yet there is surprisingly little systematic knowledge about within-country variation in spousal age differences. This study used comprehensive Swedish register data to investigate how age differences in newly married couples were associated with spouses' age, gender, education, income, and birthplace. Among both women and men, small age differences were most common among the highly educated, high-income earners, and native Swedes, whereas persons with low education, low income, and non-Swedish origin more often entered marriages with large age differences, particularly men-older marriages. Findings are discussed in relation to theoretical attempts to explain spousal age differences and sociodemographic selection into couples with different age relationships.

People who perform paid work may benefit from psychological restoration afforded by a leisure home and its natural surroundings. This may hinder the development of some forms of life-threatening illness. Using longitudinal register data for 108,114 employed Swedes, we assessed the prospective association between leisure home ownership and death before age 65. Among men, but not among women, leisure home owners had lower odds of early death, after adjustment for sociodemographic and residential characteristics (OR=0.875, 95% CI=0.702-0.980). The results bear on natural environments as health resources, inform debate on urban densification, and broaden the discussion of residence and health.

Uppsats till European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) Conference Urban Dynamics & Housing Change, Istanbul, Turkiet, 4-7 juli 2010 samt till Nordiskt seminarium om bostads- och urbanforskning, Gävle, 22-24 september 2010

How can societies ensure urban residents' access to health-promoting green spaces while also pursuing the benefits of densification? Evidence of a relationship between leisure home ownership and health can inform efforts to resolve this dilemma. Using longitudinal register data, we assessed the prospective association between ownership of a leisure home and early retirement for health reasons among 42 588 adults residing in high-density Swedish urban municipalities. The research design included controls for 'drift' of unhealthy people into particular residential circumstances, and other potential alternative explanations for the association of focal interest. After adjustment for age, socioeconomic position, and type of primary housing, logistic regression analysis revealed that men with a leisure home had lower odds of early retirement for health reasons than men who did not own a leisure home. Among women, leisure home ownership interacted with socioeconomic position; in contrast to nonowners, women who owned a leisure home had higher odds of early retirement for health reasons if they also had higher levels of education and employment income. The associations we have uncovered provide additional insight on the relationship between access to natural environments and health, and they warrant consideration in efforts to resolve the densification dilemma.

Paper presented at the Workshop on The residential context of health, European Network for Housing Research Conference, Dublin, Ireland, July 7-9, 2008 and COST E39, International Conference, "Forests, trees, and human health and wellbeing", Hamar, Norway, 27-30 August

Aims: To assess the association between housing tenure and early retirement for health reasons in Sweden with a view to psychosocial vs. material values of home ownership. Methods: The data come from linked registers that cover all people resident in Sweden during 1990-2000. The study population consists of 449,233 people aged 40-63 years in 1997. Of these, 19,350 retired early for health reasons in 1998-99. The remaining 429,883 continued their employment without extended sick leave or income decline. None moved during 1990-2000. We calculated the odds of early retirement for four forms of juridical relationship to one's housing ( private owner; part owner in a cooperative; private rental; rental from a public housing company), for men and women separately, controlling for age, education, employment income, household disposable income, region, foreign birth, and housing type. Results: Men in cooperative ownership had lower odds of early retirement than those in the three other tenure forms, for which the odds were similar. Among women, public and private renters had similar odds of early retirement, which were higher than those of women in private or cooperative ownership. For both genders, inclusion of housing type in the model after housing tenure explained little additional variance. Conclusions: The odds of early retirement for health reasons varied across different housing tenure forms in Sweden in 1998-99. The pattern of associations differed as a function of gender. Home ownership appears to involve health resources independent of basic sociophysical factors captured with differences in housing type.

Changes in welfare state in Sweden during the last decades have highlighted the role played by adult children in the care of their aged parents and the living patterns of the respective generations, including the physical distance between their places of residence. The study utilised a database comprising Sweden's total population. The calculations are based upon a population of nearly 400,000 women who were age 65 or older in 1990 and their nearest residing adult child. A comparison was made to their respective places of residence in 2000. The proximity between the older generation and at least one of their adult children is quite high - as many as 75% of the mothers live within 15 kilometres of their nearest child. The panel study showed that quit a bit of moving occurred during the 10 year period - only 40% of the cases lived within the same distance at the beginning and at the end. But there was a contrasting pattern: those living very close (less than 1,5 kilometres) moved further away while those living further away, moved closer. Although the mothers and the children moved more or less equally as often, the mothers tended to move closer while the children moved further away. The proportion of mothers who were involved in a change of proximity increased a) with age, b) with their change in civil status, and c) with the number of children.

Paper presented at the ENHR conference in Vienna, July