The Effect of Home Care Poverty on the Activities of Daily Living among Older Adults in China: A Propensity Score Matching Study

Abstract

Background: In the context of home care being valued by the Chinese government and the increasing number of disabled older adults, it is of great significance to explore the effect of home care poverty of the older adults on their ability to perform activities of daily living.

Methods: A research sample of 2583 older adults from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey data in 2018 was adopted. There were 422 participants in the treatment group and 2161 participants in the control group. According to the framework of counterfactual analysis, the kernel matching method was used to match the treatment and control groups to calculate the values of average treatment effects on treated (ATT).

Results: The results of the kernel matching method showed that the factual ADL score of the treatment group was 6.886, the counterfactual ADL score of the control group was 8.520, and the ATT value was -1.634 (P<0.05). There were gender and urban-rural differences in the relationship between home care poverty and activities of daily living among older people. In gender samples, there was a significant correlation between the two, and the absolute value of ATT in male samples was higher than that in female samples (P<0.05). In the rural samples, there was a significant correlation between the two variables (P<0.05). But in the urban samples, there was no significant correlation between the two variables.

Conclusion: Home care poverty could significantly reduce the ability to perform activities of daily living among older adults in China. Based on the conclusions, the study puts forward several suggestions to solve the home care poverty for the older adults in China.