The Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Family Care On The Elderly's Health And Life Style

Due to the increase of average life expectancy and the continuing decline of birth rate,ageing has been a severe social problem in China.Compared with young people,elderly people are much more fragile,and also they are challenged with higher level of health risk.For a long period,the maintenance or improvement of health for elderly people in China are seriously depended on home care while it's based on children.Although some local governments are attempting to develop formal care,currently formal care cannot substitute home care since it's the main source of care for elderly people.Because of huge ageing population,rapid ageing speed,frequent movement of population and severe health status of elderly people,ageing healthily in China is faced with unprecedented pressure and challenge.Unfortunately,few study is conducted on the systematical evaluation of the impact of informal care on elderly people's health and life style.In this research,we aim to systematically assess the impact of informal care on elderly people's health and life style.Our research results can provide new evidence for the severe ageing challenge.Many researches showed that informal care had significant impact on elderly people's health,however,whether it has positive or negative effect on elderly people's health remains unclear.Due to the selection bias and the endogeneity between informal care and elderly people's health or life style,how to control these and getting the real impact of informal care on elderly people's health and life style become a problem.In this study,by introducing management theory,we systematically evaluate the impact of informal care on elderly people's stress event,physical indicators,mental health,wellbeing and life style through propensity score matching and instrumental variables based on the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)2011 baseline data.The main results are listed as below:First,by introducing Maslow's hierarchy of needs,we evaluate the impact of informal care on elderly people's physical health.The results showed that there existed heterogeneity for the impact of informal care on elderly people's stress event.Informal care partly decreased the occurrence of elderly people's stress events.As many as 2/3 of elderly people experienced feeling chest pain and body pain,and 1/3 of them had fall accidents.Compared with those who were not cared,the likelihood of fall accidents and feeling chest pain for elderly people who enjoyed informal care are significantly decreased.But informal care cannot reduce the probability of feeling body pain for elderly people.There exists heterogeneity for this effect.Informal care can only reduce the likelihood of feeling chest pain and fall for male people and those living in rural area.Our results showed that informal care can partly help elderly people improve or keep good health level from physiological aspect.We find that by enjoying informal care,the probability for blood urine nitrogen,cystatin and glucose at risk level can be significantly reduced.Also,the likelihood of being hypertension and hypotension can also be significantly reduced.However,informal care cannot help reduce the probability of creatine at risk level.The results confirm that informal care cannot meet elderly people's physical health demands while it is the basic health needs.Conventional social exchange theory cannot explain the impact of informal care on elderly people's health.Second,we assess the impact of informal care on elderly people's mental health based on identification theory.Our results find that informal care can damage elderly people's mental health,it has negative effect on elderly people's mental health.The results demonstrate that informal care increases elderly people's CES-D score.The probability of suffering from depression is increased.Turn to cognition,informal care decreases elderly people's cognition score.The results indicate that currently elderly people's role are not accepted.Third,we evaluate the effect of informal care on elderly people's well-being based on matching theory.Our results find that informal care cannot improve elderly people's well-being.On the contrary,informal care can significantly reduce elderly people's wellbeing.Results from life satisfaction showed that informal care significantly reduces elderly people's life satisfaction score.The results from happiness showed that informal care also significantly reduces their happiness score.These results indicate that informal care does not match with elderly people's needs.Finally,we extend the study to life style.We explore the effect of informal care on elderly people's life style by introducing altruism.There exists heterogeneity for the impact of informal care on elderly people's life style.On the one hand,informal care can reduce the probability of smoking and its amounts.Informal care can reduce the probability of drinking,help elderly people quit drinking.Also it can reduce drinking frequency which it can prevent elderly people from bibulosity.On the other hand,informal care reduces the probability of participating in moderate and light physical activity,also for its related time.However,informal care has no effect on the probability of participating in vigorous physical activity or its related time.Also informal care has no significant effect on their diet.The positive results indicate the altruism attribute of informal care while the negative results demonstrate that elderly people have overreaction to or are overly reliant on informal care.The conclusion in this paper provides important theory and empirical evidence for understanding the real impact of informal care under current social and economical conditions.Also based on the conclusion,it can help identify and solve the existing problems in informal care and design designated informal care policy.