Elderly Long-Term Care Pattern And Decision-Making

Today, Chinese elderly long-term care situation is severe, on the one hand, the long-term care demand is rising and increasingly diversity:On the other hand, the long-term care supply still lag behind, cannot satisfy the needs of elderly. In this context, analysis the pattern and decision-making of the elderly long-term care to make feasible policy measures has important significance.This paper integrates the quantitative and qualitative research method, introduced the social capital and human capital to analyze the elderly long-term care patterns and decision-making. Formal support and informal support is the core content of Long-term care pattern, the extent of formal support and informal support intervention, depends largely on the old men's utilization degree of the two resources. Elerly long-term care decision-making, is mainly the choice between the formal support and informal support. Linnan (2006) think:social capital should be for a purpose to provide benefits for the individual action. For long-term disability, maintain and improve his own welfare emphasis the care and living security, when informal support unavailable.As for elderly long-term care patterns:First, the relation between formal support and informal support is possible neither "alternative model" nor a "complementary state", is more of a "complement model". Second, elderly long-term care pattern is not the "task specificity model", namely every care tasks are not supplied by the most suitable person, is more similar to "hierarchical compensatory model", during long-term caregiving, providers from inside to outside the propagation process hierarchy compensation, there appears a "partition effect", namely, the old man many think children are outsiders, when a spouse unable to provide care they may directly employ Labour/baby-sitter or go to nursing home. Third, the long-term disability elderly's network is along social network-support network-care network and is gradually atrophic, the process can also be seen as the old man's network cohesive, namely finally left plays the most core and key role for elderly.As for elderly long-term care decision-making:First, the family care resource inequality leads the long-term disability elderly to depend on formal support, resource inequality may be caused by two reasons, the capital deficit and the return deficit. The capital deficit because of widowed,divorced,unmarried,no birth or child deaths, which makes the long-term disability elderly embedded in a defect family structure in the network; the return deficit because of spouse or child is not willing to provide care, or is difficult to obtain. Second, for a part of the long-term disability elderly, formal support dependence due to resources transfer to children, the elderly sacrifice himself to expand children's resources, reflected the resources in the first group transfer in priority.