Self-Rated Health Trajectories among Rural Chinese Older Adults: the Role of Intergenerational Relationship

Abstract

Introduction : Self-rated health is an important predictor of adverse health outcomes (e.g. mortality) and health service use. It can be used as an effective and economic instrument to measure the health of rural Chinese older adults, which is the largest aged population in the world. However, little is known about the patterns of change trajectories of self-rated health of rural Chinese older adults. Method : The data was derived from the longitudinal study named as “The well-being of older people in Anhui Province”. The data from the 2001, 2003 and 2006 waves were included in the analysis. Multiple imputation was implemented to handle the sample attrition. General growth mixture modeling was used to investigate the number of latent classes of selfrated health trajectories as well as the antecedents of class memberships. Results : Two types of self-rated health trajectories were identified. The first is good but declining self-rated health group. The second is poor and declining self-rated health group. We found that the memberships were significantly associated with annual household income, IADLs, disease and intergenerational relationship. Conclusion: The empirical findings suggested that rural families play central roles in promoting self-rated health trajectories of rural older adults. New policies should be developed to support rural families to care for their older parents, with a particular focus on improving family relationships across generations.