Aging and social support

This entry describes the concept of social support and provides an overview of the mechanisms through which it contributes to a healthy and long life. It draws on the task-specificity and the hierarchical compensation models to explain differences in the availability of social support in late life. Though it is often suggested that the emergence of public services erodes the provision of informal support empirical support shows otherwise. The state and the family provide different forms of help to older adults, referred to as specialization or mixed-responsibility. Empirical evidence favors the complementary (crowding in) hypothesis rather than the substitution (crowding out) hypothesis. Future analyses should consider macrosocial determinants of social support in late life.