Longitudinal Study Of Self-reported Life Satisfactions And Its Determinants Among Chinese Oldest Old

Life satisfaction is cognitive judgmental global evaluation of one’s life. It is often regarded as an important indicator of individual successful aging, healthy aging, or psychological adaptation, and also an important indicator of social policy for old people, welfare and development of health care. In this paper, we took35780+year old people as the research sample, which have fully participated in the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) in the period1998-2008. And the effects of the factors including individual socio-economic characteristics, health status, self-care ability of daily life, and others on life satisfaction for oldest old were investigated Also, we analyzed the effects of the differences between individuals and development trend within each individuals on self-rated life satisfaction by HLM Model. The main results are as follows:Firstly, the factors including gender, residence and source of live significant affected evaluation of life satisfaction for oldest old. The proportion of’good’ self-rated life satisfaction is higher in male groups than that in female groups. Greater decline of the evaluation of life satisfaction for oldest old were found people living in rural areas than those living in cities. Additionally, the proportion of’good’ self-rated life satisfaction in the oldest old who has sufficient income from their own pensions for their comfortable daily live were not only higher than others, but kept relatively stable with increasing aging.Secondly, self-rated life satisfaction was also effected by self-rated health, emotion, and activities of daily living. Oldest old who has good self-rated health also has high self-rated life satisfaction. Greater higher proportion of good self-rated life satisfaction in the groups who always’look on the bright side of things’,’feel as happy as younger’, or’keep my belongings neat and clean’ than in the groups who always keep negative characters and emotions such as’often feel fearful or anxious’ or’feel lonely and isolated’. Activities of daily living closely related to self-rated life satisfaction. The group in which oldest old keep activities of daily living (ADL) kept higher percentage of good self-rated life satisfaction than the group in which oldest old need instrumental activities of daily living..Thirdly, there are also remarkable differences between individuals and development trend within individuals for self-rated life satisfaction. Confidence interval for a proportion of life satisfaction self-rated as good in the groups of oldest old is from0.26to0.89. For the demographic variable related to trends in personal development (here indicates level one variable for HLM model), degree of sefl-rated life satisfaction can be increased by the factor including good self-rated healthy, positive emotions and economic self-reliance for living of the Oldest Old. For individual socio-economic characteristic variables (level two variables for HLM), however, logarithm odds of good self-rated life satisfaction among the oldest old group in which they live in city with financial self-reliance is higher than other conditions of the oldest old.