Sociodemographic Effects on the Onset and Recovery of ADL Disability among Chinese Oldest-old

By pooling the data from the three waves (1998, 2000, and 2002) of the Chinese Longitudinal Health and Longevity Survey, this study examines the association of sociodemographic factors with the onset and recovery of ADL disability including changes in functional status before dying. The results show that the sociodemographic factors play some specific roles in disability dynamics at very high ages even after controlling for a rich set of confounders. Our results also point out that the conventional method, which excludes the information of ADL changes before dying due to unavailability of the data, overestimates the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and living alone on disability transitions whereas it underestimates the effects of SES, although such discrepancies are not very big compared with the results including information of ADL changes before dying. 1 Research Associate at the Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University. Correspondence should be sent to: Dr. Danan Gu, Sanford Institute for Public Policy, Duke University, 2024 W Main St., Durham, NC 27705, U.S.A. Email: [email protected] 2 Prof. Zeng is Research Professor of the Center for Demographic Studies and the Department of Sociology of Duke University, Professor of China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, and Distinguished Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Demographic Research – Volume 11, Article 1 2 http://www.demographic-research.org