Variation in Elderly Friendliness across the U.S. States: Operationalization, Rankings, and Selected Consequences

The United States faces a rapidly growing population of elderlycitizens. To learn more about their prospects, we engage inthree tasks. First, we develop and operationalize a five-dimensionalconcept, "state elderly friendliness," that facilitates assessingvarious political, economic, and social aspects of state environmentsthat influence the well-being of elderly persons. Second, werank states on the five dimensions of this concept. We findlarge differences both within states across various dimensionsand across states on individual dimensions. Third, we demonstratethat differences in states' ranks on our dimensional scalesare associated with sharp variations in particular societaloutcomes of importance for the well-being of various segmentsof the elderly.