Chen Simiao, Geldsetzer Pascal, Bärnighausen Till
Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH), Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
Division of Primary Care and Population Health, Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
SSM Popul Health. 2019 Jul 30;10:100462. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100462. eCollection 2020 Apr.
Population aging in middle-income countries, including China, has resulted in strong economic incentives to increase the retirement age. These economic incentives should be weighed up against the effects of later retirement on physical and mental health and wellbeing. We aimed to determine the causal effect of retirement on perceived stress, an important measure of mental well-being. We used data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey in 2015 and adopted a non-parametric regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the causal effect of retirement on stress. Stress was assessed using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)-14. On average, the effect of retirement on stress was close to the null value and insignificant. In subgroup analyses, we found that retirement reduces stress in men but raises stress in women. Though these gender-specific effects were not statistically significant, their magnitudes were large. Thus, the average null result in the entire population appears to hide opposite gender-specific effects. More research is needed to confirm this finding in studies with larger sample sizes and understand the gender-specific pathways leading from retirement to stress.
包括中国在内的中等收入国家的人口老龄化，产生了提高退休年龄的强大经济诱因。这些经济诱因应与延迟退休对身心健康和幸福感的影响相权衡。我们旨在确定退休对感知压力（心理健康的一项重要指标）的因果效应。我们使用了2015年中国健康与营养调查的数据，并采用非参数回归断点设计（RDD）来衡量退休对压力的因果效应。压力使用感知压力量表（PSS）-14进行评估。平均而言，退休对压力的影响接近零值且不显著。在亚组分析中，我们发现退休会减轻男性的压力，但会增加女性的压力。尽管这些特定性别的影响在统计学上并不显著，但其幅度很大。因此，整个人口中平均的零结果似乎掩盖了相反的特定性别影响。需要更多研究在更大样本量的研究中证实这一发现，并了解从退休到压力的特定性别途径。
