Knowledge, informal social support, and the utilization of home-based services among the elderly in Japan

This thesis explores the relationship between the utilization of home based care services and the knowledge of services, and between the knowledge of services and the informal support network among the elderly in Japan. The hypotheses are following: (1) The elderly who have little knowledge of home based care services make little use of services. (2) The elderly who have little informal support network have little knowledge of home based care services. (3) According to Ho 1 and Ho 2, the elderly who have little informal support network make little use of home based care services. (4) The utilization of services among elderly is low in Japan.;Finally, discussion and suggestions are presented in the last chapter.;The data collected from the 215 respondents in Japan are coded and processed through the SPSS computer program. In the chapter of result, two kinds of analysis are approached, such as the uni-variate statistics and the bi-variate correlation.