A Study On The Correlation Between Health And Social Participation Of The Elderly In China

Population aging is a population development trend currently faced by many countries in the world.As the country with the largest elderly population,China is experiencing rapid population aging.With the development of society and the improvement of medical technology,human life has been continuously extended,but the extension of life has not always been accompanied by the continuation of health.The health status of the elderly is still not optimistic,which will undoubtedly bring major challenges to China's economic and social development.Active aging is proposed as a development strategy to cope with population aging in the 21st century.The three elements that form the policy framework for this development strategy are health,participation,and security.These three promote each other while restricting each other,thereby forming a circular system.The relationship between social participation and health is the key to making this cycle a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the relationship between them for the realization of active aging and the improvement of the quality of life of the elderly.At present,more studies focus on the impact of social participation on the health of the elderly,while ignoring the adverse effects of health on social participation,and the relationship between the two has not been thoroughly analyzed.Based on a review of domestic and foreign literature on social participation and the health of the elderly population,this dissertation uses data from the China Health and Retirement Logitudinal Study(CHARLS)from 2011 to 2015,studies the correlation between social participation and health of the elderly from two aspects of the type and frequency of social participation,which provides policy suggestions for alleviating the impact of population aging,developing the potential of the elderly and promoting the sustainable development of society.The main body of this dissertation is divided into three parts: theoretical basis,empirical research and conclusion.In the theoretical part,the existing research results and the basic theories related to the research are reviewed and commented by using the literature research method,thus the analysis framework of this dissertation is proposed.In the part of empirical research,firstly,the basic situation of the sample and the current situation of its social participation and health are described,in which the Frailty Index is used to construct the physical and psychological frailty index of the elderly and the Latent Class Analysis is used to classify the social participation,and Then,the simple correlation between health and social participation was explored by single factor analysis.The following is the focus of this study,we focuses on the size and direction of the relationship between health and social participation,using multi-factor analysis to explore the interaction between health and social participation types by constructing a disordered multi-class Logistic model,and explore the interaction between health and social participation frequency by constructing a Latent Growth Model,and characterize the trend of social participation frequency and elderly frailty index over time.The last part is the conclusion.The research conclusions of this dissertation include the following:1.The overall health of the elderly in China is general,the prevalence of chronic diseases remains high,and the degree of aging deepens with age.The physical frailty index of the elderly in China is increasing with the increase of age,and there are obvious gender and urban-rural differences.The elderly's mental frailty index is in a state of slight fluctuation in stability,and there are also gender and urban-rural differences.2.The overall level of social participation of the elderly in China is low,and the forms of participation are not diversified enough.On the whole,the proportion of elderly people in China is not high,and more than half of the elderly do not participate in any social activities.From the type of social participation of the elderly,the proportion of "Diverse" group is the highest,and the proportion of "Disengaged" group is the lowest,that is to say,the projects of the elderly participating in social activities are relatively single and not diversified enough.3.The health of the elderly is the premise and foundation of social participation.Only under the premise of ensuring physical health,it is possible for the elderly to engage in diversified social participation.If the health status is not good,it will restrict the scope and level of social participation of the elderly.4.Active social participation is an effective way to promote the health of the elderly.The health status of the elderly in the "Diverse" group was the best,and that of the elderly in the "Disengage" group was the worst.The increase of social participation frequency is beneficial to the physical and mental health of the elderly.5.Individual differences in social participation and health among the elderly are significant.Through the analysis of latent growth model,we can find that there are significant individual differences in the initial level and growth rate of physical and mental health of the elderly and social participation frequency.6.There is a circular relationship between the health of the elderly population and social participation.This circular relationship includes not only the virtuous circle of "good health—diverse participation / high frequency—good health",but also the vicious circle of "poor health—disengage / low frequency—poor health".The innovation of the dissertation is reflected in the following aspects.The first is to construct the physical and mental frailty index of the elderly respectively,which are used to comprehensively reflect the current physical and mental health status of the elderly population in China.Second,based on the previous research,the latent class analysis is used to classify the social participation of the elderly according to the characteristics of social participation,so as to identify the types of social participation of the elderly,and then test the differences of the impact of different types of social participation on the physical and mental health of the elderly,and whether the health status of the elderly will in turn affect the selection of social participation types of the elderly.The third is to use the latent growth modeling to characterize the changes in the frequency of social participation and the physical and mental frailty index of the elderly over time.Fourth,using the method of literature research,this paper combs the mechanism of the interaction between the health of the elderly population and social participation,and points out that there is a virtuous circle and a vicious circle between the health of the elderly population and social participation.There are also some shortcomings in the dissertation.In the future research,on the one hand,more types of social participation should be included as much as possible,in order to have a more in-depth study on the social participation of the elderly;on the other hand,using longer-span data,from the perspective of life course,the dissertation makes a more in-depth analysis on the factors affecting the social participation and health of the elderly.