A Longitudinal Analysis of Productive Aging and Functional Health of Chinese Older Adults: Individual and Context Characteristics

• In Event: 3422 - Section on Aging and Life Course Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Neighborhoods

Abstract

The concept of productive aging has been widely applied in the western context to analyze the relationship between meaningful social activities and well-being among older adults. While it remains an uncharted terrain for studying Chinese older population. In the present study, we use social participation to indicate the degree of productive aging, aiming to assess the general pattern and factors that relate to the productive social participation of Chinese older adults. Utilizing data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS 2011), we perform multilevel regression analysis on a national representative sample of older adults aged 60 years and over (N=7019). Multilevel zero-inflated Poisson regression models are utilized to examine factors that influence levels of productive social participation and multilevel logit models are employed to explore individual and contextual characteristics that affect different domains of social participation. Our findings reveal that participants in our study report lower to moderate levels of social participation. Socioeconomic characteristics and health status are significant predictors of later life social participation. Community-level infrastructure and the availability of public facilities also contribute to the productive engagement of Chinese elderly. The findings of this study provide insights into how productive aging is represented in current China’s society and advance our understanding of actions communities can take to benefit the aging population.

Author

• Jiao Yu, Case Western Reserve University