Factors promoting health and preventive health behaviors among older Chinese Americans

Efforts to reduce health disparities among Chinese American elderly in the U.S. are significantly hampered by the lack of disaggregated epidemiological and behavioral data on older Asian Americans. A more sophisticated understanding of culture is also required to move towards addressing health disparities in older ages, in particular understanding culture-bound factors that contribute to preventive health activities and health care use. In order to address these challenges, this study applies the Andersen Model of Health Care Utilization to analyze the relevance of different measures of acculturation and identify consistent patterns of predisposing, enabling, and need factors that are associated with five different preventive health activities and self-reported health for older Chinese Americans, ages 50 and over. The study also examines the additional impact of proximity to ethnic enclaves on those outcomes.