Doctoral Dissertation Research: Financial and Legal Planning of Elders

The privatization of eldercare has greatly aggravated the financial burden of elders. Without adequate social and familial support, many elders turn to financial and legal instruments as they plan for their late-life care. This doctoral dissertation research investigates how older adults navigate, engage with, and reshape financial and legal settings as they conduct late-life planning. In addition to supporting the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical data collection and analysis, this research yields valuable information for government officials, elder law practitioners, caretakers, social workers, gerontologists, and fellow researchers to understand how aging experiences are intertwined with financial and legal networks. The findings of this research will help stakeholders and officials understand how elders develop strategies to build more affordable, inclusive, and equitable care for older adults. By disseminating findings from this project in non-academic venues, this research will facilitate public understanding of the meaning of late-life well-being and challenges faced by expanding aging population globally. The researcher asks what impacts cohort sociopolitical experiences have on older adults’ perception and engagement with legal and financial institutions, and what kind of understandings of institutional power and late-life well-being emerge as elders interact with official and non-official legal and financial settings. The research methods consist of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, life histories, and archival research. Ethnographically, the researcher will observe how distinct cohorts of elders make late-life property arrangements and health-relevant decisions at various sites including notary offices, financial consultancy, will registration centers, and retirement residences. This project not only sheds light on the multifaceted nature of the relationship between social, financial, and legal sectors that shape perceptions of late-life care but also reveals the assumptions and beliefs about older adults ingrained within the legal, financial, and kinship networks. Moreover, it generates a novel understanding of how elders reconfigure and co-construct legal and financial settings through their daily practices. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.