ABSTRACT
Increasing life expectancies, higher rates of mobility, and reform measures such as social security and Medicare have combined to greatly increase the relative and absolute numbers of "senior citizen" families in the United States. An increase in the proportion of rural people who are elderly, and in the proportion of elderly people who are rural, may exacerbate existing problems and create new ones for the elderly themselves and for the rural communities that must absorb them. Several earlier reviews of research have determined quite conclusively that the rural elderly are disproportionately disadvantaged on a variety of social and economic dimensions. The elderly constituted a higher proportion of urban-to-rural migrants in the 1970s than their proportion of the total rural population. Crime rates are, of course, higher in urban than rural areas, but even more important is the fact that the urban elderly are much more fearful of crime than are their rural counterparts.
