Type | Working Paper |
Title | How has elderly migration changed in the 21st century? What the data can—and can't—tell us |
Author(s) | |
Publication (Day/Month/Year) | 2014 |
URL | http://pubpages.unh.edu/~ksconway/ConwayRork ACS Feb 2014.pdf |
Abstract | Interstate elderly migration is a central argument in state policy debates regarding tax incentives, and the ‘return migration’ of the elderly who need assistance has public health implications. Yet little is known about how patterns of interstate elderly migration have changed in the 21st century; our study attempts to fill that gap. The replacement of the Census Long Form (CLF) with the American Community Survey (ACS) requires us to devise a methodology for reconciling the differences between the two data sources and creating comparable migration measures. Two commonly used data sources for U.S. migration research -- the Current Population Survey (CPS) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) -- prove inadequate for studying the migration of subpopulations such as the elderly. However, because they span 1980-2010, they aid in our methodology and help illuminate if detected changes in migration are genuine or instead an artifact of using the ACS. We find that the ACS can generate comparable migration data that reveals a continuation of previously identified geographic patterns plus changes unique to the 2000s. The small number of migrants the ACS yields, however, weakens its usefulness for analyzing annual migration patterns or for small population states. Most troubling, its changed definition of residence and survey timing leaves us unable to answer definitively the basic question of whether elderly migration has increased, decreased or stayed the same in the 21st century |