A Study of Older People with Disability: Evidence from Two Cosmopolitan Cities

Abstract

It has been widely understood that disability is a fact of human diversity. The people with disability are still not freely functional in society. There are still a considerable number of social circumstances that need to be improved and environmental barriers removed to help this group of people live boundlessly in the community. By employing questionnaire survey, the study explores the social exclusion and life circumstances experienced by older people with disability in two cosmopolitan cities: urban Hong Kong and Shanghai. The purposes of the present study are two-fold: (1) it aims to investigate the link between social exclusion and their life satisfaction, and explores how social exclusion affects the life satisfaction of disabled elderly; (2) it aims to identify the differences in the experience of social exclusion and its relationship with life satisfaction in the two cities. Via proportional sampling, 710 participants were interviewed, among whom 660 were valid. Results showed that disability and functional capacity was associated with the life satisfaction, with neighborhood exclusion as the most salient feature of social exclusion. This implies that social environment is not inclusive for disabled older people under many circumstances. Implications for how to achieve an inclusive society, especially for disabled older adults, are then deliberated in turn.