We are happy to announce that VU EVAF professor T. Baležentis with co-authors has published an article in „Social Science & Medicine“ (ABS level 4), world’s leading journal in social science research on health. It is a remarkable achievement knowing there have been only 3 other same level publications in faculty’s history.
Professor T. Baležentis: “Currently, aging societies are observed across many countries. Governments may provide environment that is friendly towards older adults through adjustments of the directions and volume of the public support. Thus, it is important to assess the impacts of the socioeconomic context on the wellbeing of the older adults. The paper chiefly focuses on the psychological wellbeing of the older adults, i.e., the prevalence of the depression among them. This issue is topical in that older adults oftentimes face economic and social hardships due to exit from the job market, illness or other age-related reasons.
The empirical research relies on the 2018 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study Wave 4 (more than six thousand observations were considered). These micro data describe the health status, living conditions and demographics of the respondents over 65 years living across provinces of China. In addition, the province-level data on socioeconomic welfare were included in the analysis. The principal component analysis was applied to construct the composite indicators representing the social, economic and medical welfare at a certain province. The research took into consideration the possible spatial heterogeneity and differences in the sample size across the regions by applying the hierarchical Bayesian mixed-effects logistic model.
The results suggest that increasing economic welfare reduces the prevalence of depression, whereas the opposite holds in the case of the medical welfare. This implies that depression may be neglected without proper access to the medical facilities. Turning to the social welfare, no significant link to the prevalence of depression was observed in China. Therefore, operation of Chinese social welfare facilities (service centers for older adults) could be improved through revising the social welfare policy in order to alleviate the depression among the older adults.”
The paper is coauthored with W. Li (Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics), E. Liu (Saint Louis University), H. Jin (Zhejiang Gongshang University) and D. Štreimikienė (Kaunas faculty, Vilnius University).
Li, W., Liu, E., Baležentis, T., Jin, H., Štreimikienė, D. (2021) “Association between socioeconomic welfare and depression among older adults: evidence from the China health and retirement longitudinal study”, Social Science & Medicine, 275, 113814.
Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113814