Life Satisfaction Of Chinese Middle-aged And Elderly And Its Related Factors

The latest reports showed that China is gradually entering aging society,until 2014 the proportion of elderly people who is over sixty years old in total population is up to 15.5%.Among the elderly population almost 20%are disability or semi disabled people.With more and more elderly people and the aging trend is going deeper,related demand is explosive growth in China's service area such as medical,pension,health care and so on.But as present,the multidimensional cooperation response to the aging issue has not been formed and strategic plan is lagging.All above put the elderly group under great pressure in lifestyle and quality of life.How to improve the life satisfaction and quality of the elderly is a common problem to those aging countries.This paper is based on China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey(CHARLS)and the existing theories.Combined with random forest,multi-class logistic regression and other machine learning methods,regarded elderly's life satisfaction as the classification object.the paper aims to discuss the main factors that influence the subjective life satisfaction and the importance degree.The content of this study includes three parts:firstly.through descriptive analysis of gender,age and other aspects to explore the distribution and composition of life satisfaction score in the elderly under different demographic factors;secondly,comparing the classification results of random forest and multi-class logistic regression shows that random forest has certain superiority whose classification accuracy is significantly better than the other one:thirdly.according to the importance of every variable in the classification model.I find out the more important factors that influence elderly's subjective life satisfaction and by analyzing those factors' action direction,I make some appropriate measures and suggestions.In this study,the average score of life satisfaction is 2.84(out of 5).Indicating that the elderly holds negative evaluation about their overall life situation.Age has a two-way effect on the life satisfaction of the elderly population.Generally speaking,people who is over sixty have a higher score of life satisfaction than the others.Consider other demographic variables:malehas higher satisfaction level than females;elderly living with a spouse is happier than living alone;the level of education has a positive effect on subjective life satisfaction.The classification results of models show that three factors that have the greatest impact on the life satisfaction of the elderly are consumption level,income level and negative emotions.The less important factors are the average sleep time,age and other factors.In general.the key economic factors occupy the absolute dominant position;followed by health factors;demographic factors are insignificant in this model.Unexpectedly,some factors such as debt and disability that other scholars pay more attention to have unobvious effect in this study.