The Use of Social Services by Hispanic Elderly

Abstract

The present study develops and tests a causal model of formal social service use by Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Cuban elderly. Path analytic procedures were used to evaluate the model on a national area probability sample of 1,805 noninstitutionalized elderly. The findings indicate that predictors of use, in general, differ by subgroups in terms of their relative importance, predictive power, complexity, and overall patterns. Implications of the findings for policy and future research are discussed.