Differential associations between subjective age and depressive symptoms among urban and rural Chinese older adults

Abstract

Objectives: Little research has investigated the prospective association between subjective-aging-perception and depressive symptoms in Chinese older adults. The aim of this study is to evaluate the differential associations of feeling old with depressive symptoms among urban and rural community-dwelling Chinese older adults using panel data drawn from two waves of nationally representative surveys.

Method: We conducted secondary data analysis and utilized the data of 5,685 urban and 5,612 rural community-dwelling older adults aged 60 years and above who participated in both the 2006 and the 2010 Sample Survey on the Aged Population in Urban/Rural China (SSAPUR). A single-item measure of subjective age was used to distinguish between feeling old and feeling not old.

Results: Ordinary least regression analyses indicated that the longitudinal effect of subjective age on depressive symptoms existed only in the urban sample (p<.001) but not in the rural sample and that feeling not old was related to less depressive symptoms in the urban sample, after controlling for baseline measures of depressive symptoms and sociodemographic and health factors.

Conclusion: This study provides new longitudinal evidence of the impact of subjective age on depression among Chinese older individuals. The findings provide useful information for depression interventions among urban older Chinese individuals.

Keywords:

• Subjective age
• depression
• later life
• urban–rural difference

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the China National Committee on Ageing (CNCA) and the China Research Center on Aging (CRCA) for making the data available for analysis. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the 29^th International Congress of Applied Psychology. The author thanks Dr. Amy L. Ai for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shanghai Pujiang Program under Grant No. 15PJC018 and Shanghai Social Science Foundation under Grant No. 2018BSH011.