Li Yanling, Xiang Yi
School of Public Administration and Law, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, China.
School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi 'an Jiaotong University, Xi 'an, China.
PLoS One. 2025 Aug 27;20(8):e0330109. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0330109. eCollection 2025.
In the context of increasing population aging and decreasing birth rate, it is of great practical significance to explore the impact of social support on the health of elderly men, which is of great practical significance to smoothly promote the strategy of healthy China and actively implement the strategy of population aging. Using the newly released 2020 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data for a total of 1,510 study participants, this paper analyzes the impact of social support on the health of elderly men using the Oder Probit, OLogit, and PSM models, and then explores the variability across age stages and literacy levels, and eliminates the propensity score matching modeling by endogeneity problems caused by sample selectivity bias. The study shows that social support significantly improves the health of older men in the context of a deepening aging process, showing positive improvements in both self-assessed health and mental health. The robustness test (by replacing the econometric model) further confirmed the reliability of the findings. Heterogeneity tests, on the other hand, revealed significant differences in the impact of social support on the health of male older adults: its health-enhancing effect was more pronounced in less literate male older adults compared to the more literate group. The results of the endogeneity analysis showed that the PSM model effectively mitigated the endogeneity problem of the model. Failure to deal with endogeneity would lead to underestimation of two aspects: first, the health-enhancing effect of social support on self-assessed health of male older adults; and second, its improvement effect on mental health. Therefore, the Chinese government should pay more attention to the key role of social support in improving the health of male older adults, and take diversified and innovative initiatives to focus on enhancing social support in order to more effectively promote the goal of healthy aging.
在人口老龄化加剧和出生率下降的背景下，探讨社会支持对老年男性健康的影响具有重大现实意义，这对顺利推进健康中国战略、积极实施应对人口老龄化战略具有重要意义。本文利用最新发布的2020年中国健康与养老追踪调查（CHARLS）数据，共计1510名研究参与者，运用有序Probit模型、有序Logit模型和倾向得分匹配（PSM）模型分析社会支持对老年男性健康的影响，进而探究不同年龄阶段和文化程度的差异，并通过解决样本选择性偏差导致的内生性问题对倾向得分匹配模型进行修正。研究表明，在老龄化进程不断加深的背景下，社会支持显著改善了老年男性的健康状况，在自我评估健康和心理健康方面均呈现出积极改善。稳健性检验（通过替换计量模型）进一步证实了研究结果的可靠性。另一方面，异质性检验揭示了社会支持对老年男性健康影响的显著差异：与文化程度较高的群体相比，社会支持对文化程度较低的老年男性的健康促进作用更为明显。内生性分析结果表明，PSM模型有效缓解了模型的内生性问题。不处理内生性问题会导致两方面的低估：一是社会支持对老年男性自我评估健康的健康促进作用；二是其对心理健康的改善作用。因此，中国政府应更加重视社会支持在改善老年男性健康方面的关键作用，并采取多元化和创新性举措，着重加强社会支持，以更有效地推动健康老龄化目标的实现。
