TITLE:
An Analysis of Factors Influencing the Self-Rated Health of Elderly Chinese People
AUTHORS:
Ping Gao, Handong Li
KEYWORDS:
Chronic Disease, Self-Rated Health, Polytomous Logistic Regression for Ordinal Response
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.3 No.5,
May
7,
2015
ABSTRACT: This study used the data from the Chinese
Urban and Rural Elderly Population Survey to analyze the correlations among the
self-rated health of elderly Chinese people, demographic factors and chronic
diseases. The results revealed that in comparing younger elderly individuals vs
older elderly individuals, the urban elderly vs rural elderly, elderly man vs
elderly women, and the elderly with fewer chronic diseases vs the elderly
with more chronic diseases, the former’s self-rated health tended to be good,
while the latter tended to be bad. In addition, over time, elderly individuals’
self-rated health tended to improve. This paper further studied high blood
pressure, heart disease, arthritis, neck and lumbar disease, and chronic
bronchitis and the impact of these five common chronic diseases on self-rated
health. The results showed that, among these five types of chronic diseases,
the impacts of heart disease and chronic bronchitis were greater than those of
the other three chronic diseases.