Living Arrangements of the Elderly in China and Consequences for Their Emotional Well-being

Abstract:

We study the living arrangements and consequences for emotional well-being of the elderly in China using data from a national probability sample survey conducted in 2010, part of the China Family Panel Studies: 14,960 households were included and information was collected for each family member. We study 7,015 people in the sample age sixty and older. We find that, compared to living independently with one’s spouse, elderly respondents living with grown children are less happy, have less life satisfaction, and are more depressed, especially when the spouse is not sharing the household. The negative effects largely disappear when there also are grandchildren in the household although widows and widowers remain more prone to depression. Elderly people living in “generation-skipping” families suffer the same fate as living with adult children but no grandchildren—they are less happy and more depressed and, when not sharing responsibilities with a spouse, less satisfied with life than independent elderly couples. Finally, living alone or living with other relatives results in a significant degradation of emotional health. But the very small fraction of elderly respondents living with non-relatives enjoys the greatest happiness and the least depression.

Acknowledgements

Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America New Orleans, 11–13 April 2013. Also presented by Treiman to the UCLA Family Working Group, 22 April 2013 (we are grateful to participants for helpful comments), and by Ren at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), Seoul, Korea, 26–31 August 2013.

Notes

We use the term “widows” to refer to both females and males, both because it is the appropriate collective term for those of both sexes who have lost a spouse and because the existing evidence for China shows no gender differences in the psychological consequences of widowhood (Li et al. 2005).

Interestingly, as Zeng and Wang (2003: 105,112) showed, the proportion of 3-generation households increased between 1982 and 1990. However, this was due to the decline in the birthrate, which resulted in fewer children living in independent households, and the increase in longevity, which resulted in more elderly per adult child.

Our claims are specific to China. Some U.S. studies show that living alone increases the likelihood of psychological well-being (e.g., Michael et al. 2001). On the other hand, a meta-analysis of 25 studies from various nations by Hu et al. (2012) concludes that, on average, living alone increases the risk of depression.

Nobel Laureate Mo Yan’s novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips (2004), gives a vivid depiction of a mother-in-law/daughter-in-law conflict that ends with the daughter-in-law murdering her senile mother-in-law.

Davis-Friedman (1983: 72–73) suggests that mothers-in-law are often critical of their co-resident son’s bride who, especially in rural areas because of village exogamy, is inherently a newcomer to an established household and community and is unfamiliar with family routines. While mothers-in-law may try to minimize conflict in recognition that eventually the power relationship will shift, with the older woman becoming dependent on the younger, many do not have the foresight or the will to do so.

Of the twenty-three excluded elderly, fourteen had both children under age sixteen and children age sixteen or older in the household. Clearly, these are people who had children late in life.

Specifically, we imputed happiness, life satisfaction, family income, closeness to children, instrumental exchanges with children, health status, and years of schooling. Variables without missing values included as predictors were depression score, type of residential arrangement (coded as a set of dummy variables), gender, age, whether housing is inadequate, the number of people in the household, urban vs. rural residence, agricultural vs. non-agricultural registration, local registration, number of productive adults (age eighteen to fifty-nine) in the household, number of productive age males in the household, mean age of household adults (age eighteen and older), mean years of schooling of household adults, a 3-category typology of labor migration/remittances, a 3-category region-of-residence variable, whether the respondent had any of several physical limitations, whether currently married, whether currently widowed, whether the family owned any businesses, the number of words the respondent could correctly read, the number of living children of the respondent, and interactions between gender and whether married and between gender and whether widowed, using Stata 13’s -chained- specification.

We also include cohabiting partners in the married category, but in contemporary China—especially among the elderly—such couples constitute only a tiny fraction of the population. In our data, 0.1 percent were cohabiting, compared to 76 percent who were currently married.

The likelihood of other relatives or nonrelatives in the household is very low. Only 1 percent of the elderly in categories 1–7 of Table 2 live in such situations and the highest percentage (in Category 3) is only 2.1.

We do know the age of both respondents and nonrespondents, and thus were able to calculate nonresponse rates by age. They increase monotonically from 10 percent of those age sixty to sixty-four to 66 percent of those age ninety-five and older (calculations based on post-stratification adjustment weights for the household samples, which yield an overall non-response rate of 14 percent, compared to 17 percent when calculated from the unweighted data).

Means were computed for each person for whom we had nonmissing data on at least four of the six items.

We initially estimated a “seemingly unrelated regression” model (using Stata’s -sureg- command). But this command is not implemented for -mi- procedures. Thus, we estimated separate models using our imputed data. The main advantage of seemingly unrelated regression is that it provides estimates of correlations among residuals. In our data (based on cases for which we had complete information for all variables in Model 2 of Table 4), the correlation between the residuals for happiness and satisfaction was approximately 0.5 and the other two correlations were approximately 0.25 in absolute value. Thus, it appears that at least to some extent the same unmeasured factors affect all three indicators of emotional well-being.

Those living with children and/or grandchildren but without a spouse are almost all widows—about 90 percent; so widowhood clearly drives any differences in outcomes between Categories 2 and 5, 3 and 6, and 4 and 7.

Additional information

About the Authors

Qiang Ren is associate professor at the Center for Social Research and associate director of the Institute of Social Science Survey, Peking University. His research interests include environment and health, population issues on fertility, mortality, labor force, housing, and sex ratio at birth. He is currently working on the China Family Panel Studies as a co-PI. In 2003 he received an award from the American Academy of Pediatrics for outstanding achievement in child health, with particular recognition for iodine deficiency control.

Donald J. Treiman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles and is currently research professor and a faculty affiliate of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. He received a B.A. from Reed College (1962) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1967), all in sociology. His research interests include social demography and cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons of systems of social inequality. For some years, he has been studying aspects of social inequality in China and more recently has focused on the determinants, dynamics, and consequences of internal migration. With colleagues, he has carried out two national probability sample surveys in China: a 1996 survey focused on inequality and social mobility over the life course and across generations (N = 6,090) and a 2008 survey focused on internal migration (N = 3,000). For additional information, see his website: http://www.ccpr.ucla.edu/dtreiman.