The impact of intergenerational support on older adults’ life satisfaction in China: Rural-urban differences

Abstract

Background:As the population ages, the importance of improving the well-being of older adults grows.
Objective:To understand the current impact of intergenerational support on the life satisfaction of older adults in China, we aimed to further improve the quality of elder care and promote the physical and mental health of older adults.
Methods:We used a probit regression analysis to examine 7825 individuals from the 2018 China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS).
Results:Various types of intergenerational support was differentially associated with older adults’ satisfaction, with significant disparities between living in a rural or urban area. Emotional support played a significant role in enhancing the life satisfaction of rural older adults, whereas the life satisfaction of urban older adults was only related to instrumental support. In general, providing support had a more positive impact than receiving support, except for emotional support.
Conclusion:The positive impact of intergenerational support on older adults may no longer be simple reciprocity or feedback but rather involve more altruistic characteristics and the pursuit of higher-level needs, such as love, respect, and self-actualization.

Keywords

Intergenerational support / Life satisfaction / Rural-urban differences / Elderly / China

Ethics approval

The study followed the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki as revised in 2013. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Foundation of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (Grant Number: 19YJA840016).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Cihang Li: Data curation, Methodology, Software. Jie Zhang: Visualization, Writing-review and editing. Junnan Li: Conceptualization, Writing-original draft. Jichao Wang: Project administration, Resources, Supervision. All the authors have read and approved the final version of this manuscript.

Declaration of Competing Interest

All authors of this paper declare that they have no conflicts of interest with the journal, the institutions they are affiliated with, and any organizations, etc.

Acknowledgments

We thank those who helped us with the article creation process. We would also like to thank the CLASS project team for working tirelessly to collect, collate, and update the data, thus ensuring a reliable source of data during the research process. We would also like to thank the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Foundation of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China for its support.

Data availability

The data for this study is publicly available.

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