Long-Term Care Preferences Among Chinese Older Adults: The Role of Sociocultural Factors

ABSTRACT

Understanding individuals’ long-term care preferences is essential to the provision of person-centered care. This study aims to describe the preferences for long-term care settings and investigates sociocultural factors associated with long-term care preferences among older Chinese adults. Responses from 22,112 older adults aged 60 years or above were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. Four ideal long-term care settings were identified: in-home care, community day care, institutional care, and undecided long-term care arrangements. The study found that the majority of participants desired to age in place at home, regardless of their health status and social support conditions. Therefore, research and advocacy efforts are needed to inform policymakers to strategically develop home-based long-term care supports in China.

Key points

• Besides needs, social means and values are crucial to long-term care preferences among older Chinese adults.

• Among different long-term care options, the vast majority of the participants (82%) preferred aging in place in a home setting.

• China’s long-term care policy should prioritize the support for developing home-based services.

KEYWORDS:

• aging-in-place
• Chinese older adults
• long-term care settings
• person-centered care
• preferences

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Chinese National Committee on Ageing (CNCA) for their leadership in survey design and data collection. The data used in this paper were obtained from CNCA under a collaborative research agreement. According to the data use agreement, the data, analytic methods, or materials cannot be made available, and a pre-registration is not required. Ethical approval is not required for this research as the analysis is based on licensed secondary data and does not contain personal and/or sensitive personal data. We would also like to thank Dr Lucas Prieto for providing support for manuscript writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Chinese government defined poverty as having an annual income per capita of less than 2,800 yuan/year in 2015 prices (about USD $406/year).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences under grant “Research on developing multi-level and multi-pillar endowment insurance systems” [21ZDA101]; and ANR Programme d’Investissement d’Avenir (PIA) under grant “Comparative approaches to autonomy policies”.