The Second Move: Health and Geographic Mobility

Litwak and Longino (1987) proposed a life course typology of elderly migration in which the second type of move is associated with the development of chronic disabilities that make it difficult to perform everyday household tasks. We examined this intermediate type of move, classified between "amenity moves" in early retirement and "institutional" moves in late old age, a type of migration that had not been verified in existing research. Using data from the 1984 and 1986 waves of the Longitudinal Study of Aging by the National Center for Health Statistics, we tested the proposition that the proportion of moves increases with higher levels of instrumental functional disability over time. The probabilities generated by our model have an impressive range as predicted by Litwak and Longino in the second move portion of their model of retirement migration.