Satisfaction among rural and urban Japanese elderly in three-generation families.

For the purpose of testing an assumption on the dual nature of aging in Japanese society, this study compared and contrasted three-generation adult families in Yamato-machi, a rural town in Niigata Prefecture in northern Japan, and in Setagaya-ku, an urban ward in Tokyo. The average ages for each generation in the study were G1 = 85, G2 = 60, and G3 = 35. The findings reveal regional variation in basic demographic characteristics such as population density, family size, proportions of the elderly 65 and over and 90 and over, as well as the prevalence of the three-generation family households. This supports the existence of dual patterns of aging in Japan today. The data also show significant differences between these regional sectors in the level of educational and economic conditions of the elderly. However, measures of the extent of satisfaction do not reveal any significant difference between rural and urban elderly. It is suspected that this is because only three-generation healthy families were interviewed in this study.