谁最能从社会参与中受益?——社会参与对老年人精神健康的异质性影响分析

Who Can Benefit Most from Social Participation?The Heterogeneous Effects on the Mental Health Among Chinese Elders

社会参与对老年人精神健康的积极影响为研究所普遍关注,但这些研究往往忽视了老年人社会参与的选择性,以及由这种选择性带来的异质性影响。本研究基于老年人社会参与的选择性,考察了社会参与及其精神健康效用之间的异质性关系。基于“中国家庭追踪调查(CFPS)”2010、2012、2014和2016的四轮数据,采用异质性处理效应的方法,利用倾向值测量出老年人社会参与的可能性,然后分别估计出在不同参与可能性的情况下社会参与的精神健康效用。研究发现,老年人社会参与可能性越小,其社会参与的精神健康效用就越大,即社会参与可能性最小的老年人才能从社会参与中受益最多,该结论得到了四个年度的调查数据支持。也详细讨论了社会参与可能性最小的老年人的特征。这一发现具有重要的政策意涵,政策制定者或者从事社会服务的社会工作者,在面对老年人社会参与问题时应当做到对象的“精准识别”,将更多的资源倾斜于那些社会参与可能性最小的老年人。

Social participation has positive effects on the mental health of the elders,which has been widely confirmed in previous literatures.However,those studies have neglected the selectivity of social participation among the elders and the heterogeneous effects.So the core question of this study is the elders who choose social participation benefit most or the elders who do not choose social participation will benefit most?Based on the“China Family Panel Studies(CF PS)”data(2010、2012、2014 and 2016),we used propensity to measure the likelihood that older people will choose social participation,and then we estimated the treatment effect on mental health in different social participation situations.The study found that the treatment effect on mental health in elders became smaller as the propensity increased,which means that those who were least likely to engage in social participation would benefit most from social participation.Our study also discussed the characteristics of the elders who are least likely to engage in social participation.Such findings in this study have important policy implications。Forexample,poli-cy makers and social workers,should identify accurately of the elders who are least likely to engage in social participation,and provide more resources to them to solve social participation problems.