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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.

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

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

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