安度晚年还是欢度晚年:老年人的旅游与主观幸福感研究

Disengagement or Activity? An Empirical Study on Travelling of the Elderly and Their Subjective Well-being

文章利用2015年的中国综合社会调查资料,考察了作为休闲活动重要组成部分之一但尚未被学界予以充分关注的旅游活动对老年人主观幸福感的影响。研究发现,老年人的旅游活动水平对其主观幸福感具有积极的影响,其影响程度超过中青年人,而且这种影响在城乡老年人之间存在差别,旅游活动水平对农村老年人主观幸福感的提升作用大于城市老年人。该研究发现证实了高活动水平有助于提升老年人主观幸福感的活动理论。文章据此提出应加大对老年人尤其是农村老年人旅游市场的关注,并采取相应策略提高其旅游活动水平,从而提升其主观幸福感及实现成功老龄化。

With the acceleration of global aging process, subjective well-being(abbreviated as SWB) which is one of the dimensions of successful aging, and its influencing factors have attracted continuous attention from academia. Among the factors that may affect the SWB of the elderly, activity level is still a controversial one, with mainly two totally different opinions: disengagement theory which proposes that older people gradually choose to withdraw from active activities with aging and by stopping participating in leisure activities they can achieve higher SWB, and activity theory which emphasizes the role of activities in improving SWB of the elderly. Most empirical researches support activity theory, however, the researches mainly talk about daily leisure activities, only very few pays attention to travel activities which are not the same as daily leisure activities on cost, time, effort, et al. Moreover, among the limited researches, all of them are conducted in developed countries, with limited samples from people who are participating travel activities or have rich travel experiences. Besides, the researches focus mainly on the emotional part of SWB, which is the immediate feeling of SWB right after travelling, neglecting the cognitive part of SWB. Given the situation, the present paper uses empirical data from developing country--China and investigates the effect of travel activities on the cognitive part of SWB of the elderly, moreover, the paper also compare travel activities’ effect on SWB between the elderly and the young and middle-aged people, and between the elderly in urban area and the elderly in rural area, which were not seen in the previous literatures. The data is from Chinese General Social Survey(abbreviated as CGSS) 2015, which is a comprehensive cross-country survey covering 28 provinces and with 8757 valid samples in total and 2792 valid samples for the elderly. The Ologit regression models show that: firstly, travel activities play a positive role in the elderly’s SWB, the more the elderly participate travel activities, the higher SWB they have;Secondly, the effect of travel activities on the elderly’s SWB is stronger than on the young and middle-aged people;and lastly, travel activities’ effect on SWB is different between urban elderly and rural elderly, and it improves rural elderly’s SWB more than the elderly in cities. The findings, together with the previous literatures, outline the panorama between travel activities and SWB of the elderly, which supports the activity theory that the elderly can improve their SWB by improving their level of activity.Moreover, the paper also shows that the travel activity level of the elderly is less than 2/3 of that of the young and middle-aged people and rural elderly’s travel activity level is only 60% of the urban elderly’s. Hence, it suggests that the related government bureaus and tourism enterprises pay more attention to the elderly market, especially the rural ones, and gradually take actions on strategy and policy construction, product development, public opinions guidance and other support system construction, so as to improve the elderly’s level of travel activities and then their SWB accordingly, helping them to achieve successful aging.