Abstract:
China’s aging population in rural areas has become a serious problem and satisfying the increased demand for senior care became very challenging. Based on a survey data of 6 counties and districts of Shaanxi Province in 2019, this paper analyzed the demand willingness to the rural socialized senior care services and explored its influencing factors by using the descriptive statistics and the binary Logit model. Results show that 82.8% of the rural seniors had the demand willingness to utilize the socialized senior care services. Currently, there were three types of socialized senior care services, including the home-based senior care services, the community-based senior care services, and the institutional senior care services; and among them, the home-based senior care services were the main type, and the regional differences were small. The most demanded contents for senior care services include the economic support, daily life care, and medical care. Household income and the degree of perfection of policies and regulations have positive impacts on the demand for the socialized senior care services. While marital status, the number of children, family size, intergenerational relations, health status, policy attention and publicity, and life care evaluation have negative impacts. Therefore, it is necessary to further improve the rural social security system, to correctly handle the relationship between family senior care and socialized senior care, and to rationally arrange the contents of the socialized senior care service according to the needs of the seniors in rural areas.