The Research Of Social Support On Urban Elders Living Alone

With the implementation of China’s one-child policy,the traditional nuclear family structure disrupted and the4-2-1family structure becomes the mainstream, the traditional family pattern which the three or four generations lived together has broken. Meanwhile the thoughts of the elderly and the children changes, the pure old family and single-dwelling elders attracts people’s attention. Compared with the general elders, single-dwelling elders lacks support from the spouse and their children, due to the mode of living. In some respects, elders living alone is the most vulnerable old groups. This paper regards the most vulnerable groups of the old-elders living alone-as the object. This paper studies their characteristics in social support, and proposes suggestions to improve their social support system.Social support theory was put forward by western scholars in the1970s,inter scholars introduced it in1980s and extensively study vulnerable groups. Though the study of social support on old people as a whole and ignored the difference among different colonies within the old, especially single-dwelling elders.Moreover,social support exists deferences between the eastern china and western china,and the existing researches on elders living alone mostly lies in the eastern china.This article studies social support of elders who live alone in Chengdu.On the one hand,this paper apply social support theory to new group(elders living alone)and new region(western china).On the other hand,this article provides new data and analysis of western china’s single-dwelling elders for relevant departments.This paper regards elders living alone in Chengdu as the object, and to reveal social support situation of urban elders living alone from content of social support(financial support, life care support and spirit support)and sources of social support(formal support and informal support);Formal support and informal support play the role in the elderly life; Finally on this basis, make appropriate recommendations and ways to build urban single-dwelling enders’s support system, and to improve the quality of their supported. The study used questionnaires and interviews to collect data and make use of SPSS19.0to do statistical analysis. The paper is divided into four parts:Part1of this paper is introduction. This part starts with the research background and research significance, then summaries the related domestic and foreign research and points out the innovation and research problem of this paper. Then it defines the main concepts.Part2is the design of the study. This part introduced the detailed distribution of Chinese single-dwelling elders, the reason and standard of the survey and object. Then it introduces sampling method, questionnaire content, research and analysis method of the study.Part3includes3th to6th chapter of thesis, which mainly discusses the survey results and subsequent analysis. First, it introduces the investigation’s demographic characters and analysis the reason why elders lives alone. Then it analysis the status and characters of social support of elders living alone, and the paper gets these conclusions:the single-dwelling enders’s economical status and self-care ability is good,but the proportion of loneliness is higher than average of the urban elders. Inn social support status, formal support from pension plays important role in economical support.informal support from children, friends is prominent in life-care support and spirit support our.Part4includes chapter7.Firstly,it explain the preference of different social support sources for elders living alone, and analysis the supply of social support for elders living alone is insufficient. Then based on the above analysis, the author proposes suggestions to improve the single-dwelling enders’s social support, from the aspects of government, community and family.