The elderly at this time of economic crisis: sometimes one of dependency and other times one of family supporting

Abstract

The economic crisis is having an important impact on the living conditions of society as a whole and on the aged especially. The purpose of this note is to present the first steps in research under way to revise certain stereotypes regarding the aged and to delve into the role they are carrying out during the economic crisis as the supporters of other generations and of a large part of social well-being.With this purpose and descriptively, this research note presents some of the first results that show us the recent evolution of the indicators of the living conditions of the aged, mainly covering demographic, residential, socio-economic and health aspects. These results have been obtained from data provided mainly by the Living Conditions Surveys prepared by the National Statistics Institute (INE) for 1995 –2010 and the updating of some of them up to 2012by the INE and IMSERSO (2012 -2013).