Rural Elderly Social Support Network

By analyzing the data of older people from a sample of 638 residents of rural area in Shanxi, the current study describes the general social support network patterns of older people in rural china and explores the effect of social status and network pattern on physical and mental health.The typical social support network of older people of the rural residents in Shanxi is small but socially homogeneous. Most of the network members are kin of the focus person and they are densely connected. Network pattern vary among older people of different social groups. Older people of higher social status are able to maintain a large, diverse, and loosely connected network. Education and occupation are the most prominent indicator of the individual social status that is positively link to the network range. The more people older, the larger his network size is and the lower his network diversity. In comparison to women, men's networks are much more friendship-oriented and less kinship-oriented. Men have less cross-gender support network partners than women and men's network diversity in Party membership is lower than women's. The network providing for the elderly is similar to the social support network. But it has larger size, more ingroup choice ,lower diversity ,lower percentage of kin and denser relations with network members.The study also explores the relations between network members'individual characteristic and support. The network members whose social status is higher often provide important support while the network members whose social status is lower often provide minor support. Men Provide broader support than women and provide most emotional support and instrumental support while women provide some support which women are good at. The elderly provide emotional support and social companionship while the young provide instrumental support. The married network members provide emotional support and instrumental support and the singers provide social companionship. Strong ties provide almost every kind of support and weak ties hardly provide any support. Physical access promotes lending and minor household services and is negatively related to important emotional and instrumental support .The network members who have higher frequency of telephone contact with focus person provide more important support than the persons who have lower frequency of telephone contact.Among the social roles, kin is the main provider of emotional and instrumental support while friends are the main provider of social companionship. Neighborsprovide minor instrumental support and social companionship. The ties from workplace only provide two kinds of support of emotion and companionship.Among various kinship roles, son provides more types of social support than the other kinship roles that are nearly all most important instrumental support. Daughter takes care of focus person in times of sickness and provides some kinds of emotional suppoitHusband and wife provide support if one feels depressed or go out. Brother and sister are similar to this. He or she is the person with whom one can discuss family problems and one can call on. The other kin provide minor support.Finally, The study researches the influence of social status, quantity and quality of social support and change of network on physical and mental health of older people. It proves that social status, social support and network change of the elderly in rural area all significantly related to physical and mental health. Among the three variables of social status, individual income influences life satisfaction while occupation influences physical health. Among the quantity of social support, the support from spouse is related to life satisfaction and physical health significantly while number of son and daughter is only related to life satisfaction. In the aspects of quality of social support, tie strength is positively related to life satisfaction of older people and the quality of economic capital in network capital is related to life satisfaction a...