Abstract
Due to insufficient financial support and unceasing work, the rural elderly in China experience a range of mental disorders, and the most common one is depression. This study aims to investigate the association between public pension, labor force participation (LFP), and depressive symptoms for older men and women in rural China. A moderated mediation analysis is conducted using data in the 2015 wave extracted from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), a continuous national social survey. A total of 2709 available surveys were obtained in our analysis. Using PROCESS, results revealed that the income from China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) was directly negatively related to depressive symptoms. However, LFP did not mediate the link between pension income (PI) and depressive symptoms in the total study population. The results of moderated mediation estimates indicated that gender significantly moderated the relationship between LFP and depressive symptoms. Specifically, for older women, the indirect effect of PI on depressive symptoms via LFP was significant, but not for the opposite sex. In order to improve the mental health of older adults in rural China, the policy makers and mental health therapists need to pay attention to the aforementioned factors.
Highlights
Depression is one of the most common mental disorders among older adults, and correlates with morbidity and suicide [1,2,3,4]
This study extends previous findings by demonstrating the pathway from public pension to depressive symptoms through labor force participation (LFP) across gender in rural China
The results are consistent with recent studies indicating that an increase in the income from New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) is related to a decrease in LFP and depressive symptoms
Summary
Depression is one of the most common mental disorders among older adults, and correlates with morbidity and suicide [1,2,3,4]. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 15%. No accurate depressed geriatric population calculations were made for China, about 40% of older adults had reported depressive symptoms according to the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal. The prevalence of depression in rural China is more serious than that in urban. China [8,9]. This difference is relevant to insufficient social support [10] and unceasing work in rural areas. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 3193; doi:10.3390/ijerph17093193 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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