Research On The Elderly’s Living Arrangement Choice Behavior Based On ICLV Model

China is facing the severe challenge of population aging and the situation has caused dual caregiving crises on the Chinese elderly.On one hand,due to the contradiction between Chinese traditional family value and social economy development,family care is likely to diminish in availability.First,Chinese elderly prefer to live with their children other than living along or in a institution because of the cultural effect.However,reasons related to the demise of the extended family and floating population place caregiving pressure on adult children and lead to a sharp decrease in family caregiving availability.On the other hand,there is a contradiction between the willing of a better elderly life and the unbalanced,inadequate old-age service system as well as the development of old-age services,which lead to the lack of society caregiving services accessibility.Living arrangements,which is one of the most important decisions of the elderly,have been acknowledged as a key issue of elderly care and are considerably associated with the life satisfaction and well-being of the elderly.So far,the theoretical and practical importance of elderly’s living arrangement has been noticed by numerous literatures and many studies have deeply explored the influencing factors of the elderly’s living arrangement at the individual level.However,considering Chinese traditional Confucian filial piety culture,the elderly’s living arrangements are actually family-level joint choice behavior associated with family organization and interaction involving both the elderly and their adult children.Therefore,the effect of children’s upward support and unobservable attitudes on elderly’s living arrangements cannot be neglected.Taking the above arguments into account.this dissertation research concentrates on the impact of upward family intergenerational support and children’s subjective attitudes on the elderly’s living arrangements.First,a Multinominal Logit(MNL)model is adopted to analyze the Micro-influence mechanism of the elderly’s living arrangements,especially examine the relationship between elderly’s living arrangements and children’s upward support behavior.Subsequently,an integrated choice and latent variable model(ICLV)of living arrangement which incorporates children’s values and preferences into the behavioral "black box" is conducted to captures the additional influence of these abstract psychological constructs in determining living arrangement choice.Finally discuss the empirical results of the above models and provide insights to planners and policy-makers.The main contents and conclusions include the following aspects:(1)A basic MNL model is constructed to exhaustively analyze significant predictor of elderly’s living arrangements,including elderly’s socio-economic characteristics,physical health,mental health and intergenerational support behavior.The results show that the characteristics of the elderly,the intergenerational support behavior of children,the health status and mental health of the elderly all affect the choice of living arrangements for the elderly to varying degrees.Among them,most of the intergenerational support behaviors of children can significantly affect the choice.The result of the model confirm that family support is still the main source of old-age service and long-term care for the elderly,indicating that the core concept of old-age care for the elderly in China is still deeply influenced by traditional culture.(2)The ICLV model,which accounts for both observed attributes and underlying psychological elements effects,is applied to empirically explore living arrangement choice.Typically,the model includes two components,a discrete choice model and a latent variable model.In this dissertation research,the multinomial discrete choice model component allows the alternative’s utilities to depend on both observed variables and latent characteristics of the elderly and their children.The latent variable model component allows for the operationalization of the relationships among several latent constructs.The model is estimated by a full information estimation approach.It is found that adult children with different socioeconomic attributes have different values and preference on living arrangements.Also,significant cause effects of adult children’s attitudes on the actual living arrangement choice are empirically confirmed,which implies the long-term living arrangement choice of the elderly could be outcomes of the family members’ joint choice behavior.The findings could provide several political implications in China.This study extends the previous studies on living arrangement of the elderly under the Chinese-specific cultural background by investigating simultaneously the effects of the observed variables and latent variables.Innovatively combination of the vital sociology issue and the management science method is applied to examine the major factors affecting the living arrangement choice behavior.