Familial support of rural elderly in indian family system: A sociological analysis

Abstract

A joint family system is considered as a basic feature of our rural villages. Village people adopt this system as they employ this family living in arrangement in managing their agricultural activities because of its extended and communitarian form. Hence, the older rural people do their best approaching their close relatives and try to develop the confidence level of their own young and married family members. The family persistence is always successful. However, there are frequent instances that due to failure in the negotiation, there is always family separation, which happens in the case of both elderly father, mother, and three married sons, as a result of which, elderly individual who was always leading a popular and family head position do not get a proper treatment, which leads to a great loss affecting badly for his age-long family support and the same result in discontinuation of the elderly leader, who do not get any respect and reputation from others. This research helps in social science research, which was conducted in the selected areas of Salem district, in which systematic random sampling was employed to choose 400 aged in the rural region. The purpose of this research is to determine the family support available to the rural aged with the Indian family system. In the rural context, the elderly individual experiences many problems as they are based on the social, economic, and cultural factors in rural areas. In this research, 400 elderly individual were chosen and this study is conducted using descriptive design, which involves survey research method. The findings reveal that, rural aged face a lot of problems in the process of determining their family support.