The purpose of this investigation, conceived in its broadest sense, was to study the living arrangements of older persons over a specific period of time in an attempt to arrive at some generalizations about the nature and changes of these arrangements as they relate to certain sociological variables.

Promoting population health is an essential task for sustainable development. This study explores the association between socioeconomic status and perceived health in the United States, with special attention on the influence of living arrangements. It also improves the existing explanations of causal mechanisms underlying the impact of SES on health among Americans over 50. Using the first and seventh waves of Health and Retirement Study to run ordered logistic regression, this research addresses the importance of living arrangements and social capital on self-reported health. Income and education are both important predictors of self-reported health. In addition, living arrangements and household social capital also affects self-reported health after controlling individuals’ characteristics and SES indicators. These effects do not appear to mediate the socioeconomic effects on self-reported health. Future research should highlight better measures of living arrangements and social capital, as well as explore longitudinal analyses.

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Canada’s population is aging rapidly, and understanding living arrangements and their determinants plays a critical role in supporting healthy aging. This thesis examined, using a population-based longitudinal survey, the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study, the effects of clinically-significant change in physical and mental health on future living arrangements, employing generalized estimating equations logistic regression models. Clinically-significant decline in SF-36 Physical Component Score (PCS) increased likelihood of not remaining community-dwelling, or “aging in place” over stable or improved scores by 41%. SF-36 Mental Component Score (MCS) did not show a statistically significant effect on aging in place. Older age and employment status of retired or unemployed increased likelihood of not aging in place, whereas living with a partner, pursuing moderate or vigorous physical activity, and having children increased the likelihood of aging in place. Study findings will inform social and health policy development to support aging in place in Canada and elsewhere.

Extended households are far from a rare phenomenon in Latin America and their prevalence does not seem to be in decline. In Chile, they accounted for about a quarter of all households over the 1990–2011 period. This persistence contrasts with the dramatic transformations that have taken place in other dimensions of family life, such as the fall in fertility and marriage rates, and the increase in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births. Recent studies on extended living arrangements in the region have mainly understood household extension as a strategy to face economic deprivation, giving little attention to other factors affecting it, such as gender inequalities and changing needs for support over the life course. In this dissertation, I contribute to the understanding of extended households Chile through the analysis of adult women living in family units over the 1990–2011 period. Unlike most other studies, I recognise the unequal positions that individuals and families occupy within the extended household, by distinguishing between women that head an extended household and those that join it as subfamilies. Using quantitative methods, I analyse a nationally representative household survey: the CASEN survey. This is the most complete data source on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the Chilean population. This dissertation offers a new assessment of the relationship between extended living arrangements and economic deprivation. Its findings only partially support the hypothesis of household extension as a family strategy to face economic hardship. Other key factors emerge when explaining extended living arrangements, including mothers’ full-time employment, the vulnerability of informal family structures, and other needs of support connected to the life course. There has been an increasing trend across 1990–2011 for young women who have started their family life to live in extended households. Multivariate analyses reveals that this increase was mainly influenced by the rising prevalence of cohabitation and single lone motherhood among younger generations, and to a lesser extent by the increase in young women’s full-time employment. These findings raise important theoretical issues for the Chilean context and show that patterns of social modernisation and family change in Chile have gone hand-in-hand with an increasing importance of the support provided by the extended family. This dissertation fills an important gap in the research on intra-household gender inequalities by analysing women’s economic dependence on extended household members. It shows that women in subfamilies are more likely to be economically dependent than those in head-families. Full-time employment, as well as marriage and cohabitation, emerge as highly protective factors against economic dependence. Special attention is paid to lone mothers, who are often excluded from research on women’s economic dependence. Lone mothers in subfamilies benefit economically from being in an extended household. Yet overall they have decreased their likelihood of being economically dependent over the 1990–2011 period. I argue that this reflects the increasing social protection towards lone mothers and recent legal reforms aimed at the equalisation of rights among couples and children irrespective of the marriage bond.

L’histoire de la famille musulmane est née au début des années 1990 d’un souci commun d’éviter les généralisations hâtives et d’accumuler les faits élémentaires de la vie familiale et résidentielle. Or, le discours scientifique actuel, aussi bien que celui qui l’a précédé, restent fondés sur une même série de postulats qui conduisent à voir dans les modalités de la vie résidentielle et familiale propres aux sociétés de l’Islam la prégnance d’une mentalité collectiviste, la persistance d’une volonté ancrée dans l’esprit des individus de vivre « entre soi » dans la promiscuité d’une maisonnée nombreuse et complexe. Dans l’esprit d’une critique positive, cette thèse s’attache à illustrer la pertinence d’une perspective « atomiste » au regard des Ammeln, à savoir un groupe de paysans berbérophones natifs des hautes terres de l’Anti-Atlas, dans le Sud du Maroc. Cela se fera à la lumière d’une multitude de sources ethnographiques, démographiques et archivistiques, grâce auxquelles il sera possible de remonter le fil du temps et de suivre les processus de formation et de transformation des maisonnées établies par les habitants du pays des Ammeln depuis l’époque précoloniale jusqu’à nos jours. Ainsi, il apparaitra plus clairement que, dans les sociétés de l’Islam, aussi petites et isolées soient-elles, les noyaux familiaux sont enclins à vivre « chacun chez soi », et qu’ils n’acceptent de faire autrement qu’en raison d’un ensemble de forces et de contraintes sociales particulières les empêchant d’atteindre l’autonomie résidentielle et de bénéficier de la liberté d’action qui en découle. / Family history in the Islamic Middle East was born in the early 1990s from a shared concern to avoid sweeping generalizations and accumulate the basic facts about residential and family life. However, both the current scientific discourse and the one that preceded it are based upon a common set of assumptions that suggest that members of Islamic societies share a collectivistic mentality and a common desire to live amongst themselves in the promiscuity of large and complex households. In the spirit of positive criticism, this thesis aims to illustrate the relevance of a new “atomistic” perspective by studying the case of the Ammeln, a group of peasants from the Berber highlands of the Anti-Atlas, in Southern Morocco. This research is based on a variety of ethnographic, demographic and historical sources that make it possible to go back in time and follow the process of formation and transformation of households in this small village community, from pre-colonial times to the present day. As such, it will become clearer that, in Islamic societies, as small and isolated as they may be, elementary family units are inclined to live on their own, and that they choose to do otherwise only because of a given set of forces and constraints preventing them from attaining residential autonomy and benefiting from the resulting freedom. / Thèse réalisée en cotutelle avec l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris).

Thèse réalisée en cotutelle avec l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). / L’histoire de la famille musulmane est née au début des années 1990 d’un souci commun d’éviter les généralisations hâtives et d’accumuler les faits élémentaires de la vie familiale et résidentielle. Or, le discours scientifique actuel, aussi bien que celui qui l’a précédé, restent fondés sur une même série de postulats qui conduisent à voir dans les modalités de la vie résidentielle et familiale propres aux sociétés de l’Islam la prégnance d’une mentalité collectiviste, la persistance d’une volonté ancrée dans l’esprit des individus de vivre « entre soi » dans la promiscuité d’une maisonnée nombreuse et complexe. Dans l’esprit d’une critique positive, cette thèse s’attache à illustrer la pertinence d’une perspective « atomiste » au regard des Ammeln, à savoir un groupe de paysans berbérophones natifs des hautes terres de l’Anti-Atlas, dans le Sud du Maroc. Cela se fera à la lumière d’une multitude de sources ethnographiques, démographiques et archivistiques, grâce auxquelles il sera possible de remonter le fil du temps et de suivre les processus de formation et de transformation des maisonnées établies par les habitants du pays des Ammeln depuis l’époque précoloniale jusqu’à nos jours. Ainsi, il apparaitra plus clairement que, dans les sociétés de l’Islam, aussi petites et isolées soient-elles, les noyaux familiaux sont enclins à vivre « chacun chez soi », et qu’ils n’acceptent de faire autrement qu’en raison d’un ensemble de forces et de contraintes sociales particulières les empêchant d’atteindre l’autonomie résidentielle et de bénéficier de la liberté d’action qui en découle. / Family history in the Islamic Middle East was born in the early 1990s from a shared concern to avoid sweeping generalizations and accumulate the basic facts about residential and family life. However, both the current scientific discourse and the one that preceded it are based upon a common set of assumptions that suggest that members of Islamic societies share a collectivistic mentality and a common desire to live amongst themselves in the promiscuity of large and complex households. In the spirit of positive criticism, this thesis aims to illustrate the relevance of a new “atomistic” perspective by studying the case of the Ammeln, a group of peasants from the Berber highlands of the Anti-Atlas, in Southern Morocco. This research is based on a variety of ethnographic, demographic and historical sources that make it possible to go back in time and follow the process of formation and transformation of households in this small village community, from pre-colonial times to the present day. As such, it will become clearer that, in Islamic societies, as small and isolated as they may be, elementary family units are inclined to live on their own, and that they choose to do otherwise only because of a given set of forces and constraints preventing them from attaining residential autonomy and benefiting from the resulting freedom.