Meeting social care needs and its impact on well-being of older people ‘left-behind’ in rural China.

China’s internal population movement is dominated by rural labour migrants moving without their families, leaving older parents and young children at rural hometowns. The deficiency of support for the rural older left-behind population has recently begun to draw the attention of the central government and researchers in various disciplines. However, the majority of previous research related to the left-behind population was based on migrant workers’ perspective. It is not sufficient to reveal the well-being of left-behind in rural area by using secondary data from migrant-oriented surveys. The term ‘left-behind’ is a flexible term with endogenous heterogeneity in different contexts, and this research will focus on the older people left-behind and their well-being in rural China, adopting a mixed-method approach to collect small-scale primary data in three rural villages from older persons and from their social networks, in order to examine the process of ‘becoming left-behind’ and its impact on meeting older people’s social care needs. The results of this research have the potential to inform the social care needs and socio-economic circumstances of older people left-behind in rural China, providing research evidence for policy that can contribute to the improvement of wellbeing for older people in rural China.