Characteristics of elderly family caregivers and

Chinese society is experiencing a stage of rapid aging. Compared with the young elderly, the older and the oldest elderly care have a greater need in daily life, their care needs mainly by family members. For sick or disabled elderly, long-term care/nursing will cause higher demand for the expenditure of caregiver’s time, physical, economic and psychological undertaking. If not to be supported from outside the family, it will cause two aspects of the problem for a care provider and the care receiver. For younger care givers, too much family care burden might affect their quality of life and career. Under the situation of women being caregivers, it is in particularly disadvantaged for women’s development. For older caregivers, they are already older, care may be limited to the elderly, so as to reduce the quality of care. Therefore, understanding the characters of the caregivers groups, is helpful for formulating family support policies.

This article will use the 2010 national survey on Chinese womem’s social status survey data and apply multivariate statistical methods to describe and analyze the demographic characteristics of family caregivers, estimate the burden of caregivers of different features, discussion the related family support policy implications.