关键词: 老年人, 抑郁症状, 代际支持, 老化态度, 城乡因素

Abstract: Depressive Symptoms for older adults have become one of the serious health problems in the ageing society of China, which has numerous negative effects on wellbeing for older adults. It is meaningful to investigate the potential mechanism of depressive symptoms and intergenerational supports within family under the social transition of traditional cohesion of filial piety in China, especially to explore the association between social supports providing from children and the depressive symptoms for older parents, even though the results are usually mixed. The mechanisms underlying how intergenerational supports affect depressive symptoms is fairly limited. The attitude toward ageing is the internal experience and evaluation on the process of ageing for older adults. Drawing from cognitive-behavioral theories of depression and socioemotional selectivity theory, this study constructs a mediation model that intergenerational supports affect depressive symptoms through attitude toward ageing. In addition, as the long-time of urban and rural division in China, this effect of intergenerational supports on attitude toward ageing and depressive symptoms for older people demonstrates the disparities in rural and urban areas. However, very few studies have explored the urban-rural differences in the effects of intergenerational supports on attitude toward ageing and depressive symptoms. In response to the research gap, the current study explores the moderating effects of urban-rural disparities on these associations.
The 2014 wave of China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS) was employed in this study. The 2014 wave of CLASS was conducted in 28 provinces across mainland China, with 11,511 samples included in the survey. In the analyses, this study excluded those failed to pass the cognitive function examination prepared in advance as well as the samples with missing data of key variables. Finally, a total number of 4,188 samples was selected, with 2,823 in urban and 1,365 in rural areas. SPSS 23.0, the program PROCESS, and Amos 20.0 were used in this study to analyze data. At first, this study examined the common method deviation analysis. Secondly, this study reported the descriptive results and the correlation analysis between main variables. Thirdly, the bootstrap estimation procedure in PROCESS was employed to investigate the mediating role of attitude toward ageing on the association between intergenerational supports and depressive symptoms. At last, PROCESS was applied to explore the moderating role of urban-rural disparities on the effects of intergenerational supports on attitude toward ageing and depressive symptoms.
The results are as follows: (1) Intergenerational supports are significantly associated with older adults’ depressive symptoms. (2) The attitude toward ageing plays a mediating role in the relationship between intergenerational supports and depressive symptoms. (3) Although the urban-rural disparity doesn’t significantly moderate the associations between intergenerational supports and attitude toward ageing, the urban-rural differences on the relationships between intergenerational supports and depressive symptoms are significant: intergenerational economic support and care support have higher significant effects in reducing rural elderly’s depressive symptoms than urban older adults.
Some theoretical and practical contributions are proposed by the study. The results suggest that intergenerational supports are significantly associated with depressive symptoms for older adults. Furthermore, the results present a framework through exploring the mediating effects of attitude toward ageing, which clarifies the underlying mechanism between intergeneration supports and depressive symptoms, and also inspire the future intervention of reducing older adults’ depressive symptoms. In addition, intergenerational economic and care supports are more significantly related to rural group, which reveals that the lack of formal social support systems for rural elderly persons causes them over dependent on informal family intergeneration supports. It’s urgent and necessary to bridge the gaps of formal support system for older people in rural areas, such as pension, medical insurance and long-term care services.

Key words: older adults, depressive symptoms, intergenerational supports, attitude toward ageing, urban-rural disparity