隔代照料、生产活动对农村老年人健康的影响

The Influence of Grandchild Care and Agricultural Work on the Health of Rural Elderly

既从事农业生产活动又照料孙辈是我国农村老年人劳动供给的一个重要特征。本文利用中国健康与养老追踪调查(CHARLS)的多轮调查数据,采用排序Probit模型预测身体健康指数,构建多层线性模型,同时引入农业生产和隔代照料,分析二者对农村老年人身体健康和认知功能的影响,并采用倾向得分法,构建权重变量进行了稳健性检验。研究发现,农业生产的劳动强度对农村老年人健康影响的主效应显著,即劳动强度越高越不利于健康;隔代照料对健康的影响与农业生产的劳动强度相关,在劳动强度较低时能在一定程度上改善农业生产活动对农村老年人健康的不利影响。本文进一步探讨了农业生产和隔代照料影响农村老年人健康的机制,发现农业生产的劳动强度主要通过改变健康行为而影响农村老年人健康,隔代照料可通过调节劳动强度对健康行为、家庭和社会支持的影响,从而对农村老年人的健康产生影响。因此,鼓励农村老年人在老龄阶段减轻农业生产的劳动强度并从事适量的隔代照料或其他家庭照料,有利于改善农村老年人的健康状况。

It is common for the rural elderly acting as both agricultural producer and grandchild care giver.Using the data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey(2011,2013,2015,and 2018),this paper applies hierarchical linear model(HLM) to analyze the influence of agricultural work and grandchild care on the physical health and cognitive functioning of rural elderly after predicting physical health index with ordered Probit model.In robustness check, propensity score weighting is used to take into account potential selection bias.The results indicate that the labor intensity of agricultural work has significantly main effect on the health of the rural elderly;and the corresponding main effect of intensity of grandchild care is not found, but the effects of grandchild care on the health of the rural elderly are subjected to the labor intensity of agricultural work, which represents that grandchild care can improve the unbeneficial effect of labor intensity of agricultural work on the health of rural elderly to a certain extent when the labor intensity is kept low.Further analysis of moderated mediation effect is provided to explain the casual effect of labor intensity of agricultural work on the health of the rural elderly, which is mainly transmitted by the mediators, such as health investment behaviors, and moderated by grandchild care in the process of labor intensity of agricultural work affecting a range of mediators.Therefore, the rural elderly’s health will be promoted if they are encouraged to alleviate the intensity of agricultural work and engage in moderate grandchild care or other family care in the aging stage.