The Impact Of Social Capital On The Health Of Rural Elderly

With the development of economy and technology,Chinese material living and medical service standards have improved,and people are paying more attention to their own health problems.Compared with other groups,the elderly have a higher rate of physical aging and face higher health risks.To improve the health among the elderly is one of the core elements of implementing the "Healthy China" strategy for Chinese government,which is also an important measure to cope with the aging of the population in China.Rural elderly account for more than half of the entire elderly population,but they are in a disadvantaged position in terms of economic income,nutrition,health care and medical services.Therefore,the rural elderly should be widely concerned by society.Individual health not only affects the happiness of the elderly and the quality of old-age care,but also affects social stability and harmony.This paper focuses on the health problems of the special group of rural elderly in China.Based on the theory of social capital and health needs,this paper used the 2016 Chinese Family Panel Survey(CFPS)data to divide social capital into two categories: structural and cognitive social capital.Firstly,this paper described the basic situation of social capital and health among the rural elderly.This paper did correlation analysis of various variables that require regression analysis.Secondly,this paper used OLS regression to explore the direct impact of social capital on the health of rural elderly.Finally,this paper explored the indirect impact of social capital on the health of rural elderly through the mediating variables of physical activity and positive attitude.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: Firstly,social capital has a significant promotion on the health of rural elderly.The impact coefficient of structural social capital is 0.048,and the impact coefficient of cognitive social capital is 0.073.After dealt with the endogenous problem,the impact coefficient of structural social capital becomes 0.045,but the positive impact of structural capital on health is still significant.Secondly,both physical activity and positive attitude play a part in mediating effect in the process of structural or cognitive social capital affecting the health.In general,the mediating effect of positive attitude is stronger than physical activity.The third,the impact of social capital on the health of rural elderly is heterogeneous,showing the difference of age,gender,and region.The innovations of this paper are as follows: This paper divided social capital into two types of structural and cognitive social capital,and more accurately measured the impact of different aspects of social capital on health.This paper discussed in depth how social capital affects health and used mediation effect analysis to better show the influence path through the two intermediary variables of positive attitude and positive attitude.This paper used the structural social capital variable with a lag period as an instrumental variable to solve the endogenous problem.The shortcomings of this paper are as follows: the connotation of health is more complicated,and this paper used the self-rated health,others-rated health and operational self-care ability to obtain a health evaluation index,measuring the health level of rural elderly.This measurement method was not very accurate in this paper.Health is affected by lifestyle,social environment and other factors.Many variables affecting health have not been included in the model for investigation because of limited data.