Bridging the gap: socioeconomic inequalities in the use of formal and informal home care

Independent variables

Explanations​​

Age

It is assumed that older people will be more likely to use formal care since they often live alone (without a spouse or children in their immediate environment), and their health condition becomes increasingly complicated with age, requiring professional care. Age is a quantitative variable that measures the age of the respondents³ at the time of the survey.

Gender

Women are more likely to be widowed. With a longer life expectancy and having cared for their spouses throughout their lives, they themselves become dependent on other people's help. Since the complexity of health conditions increases with age, it is assumed that they will use formal care. Gender is a binary variable, indicating whether the respondent is female.

Education

Higher levels of education are associated with greater access to information, higher income, and a tendency to choose formal care. Education is a quantitative variable that measures the total number of years of formal education completed by respondents.

Income

Higher income provides greater opportunities and greater use of formal care. Household income is determined by the total average income of all family members. As income has an asymmetric distribution with most respondents having lower values and a smaller number of respondents having high and very high values, the variable will be transformed by its natural logarithm before inclusion in the analyses. This quantitative variable in the paper is marked as Income.

Marital status

Married people are more likely to choose informal care, as one of the spouses can take on the role of informal caregiver. The marital status variable is a binary variable, where the first category includes the original categories: “never married”, “divorced”, “widows/widowers”; and the second categories: “married, living with spouse”, “registered partnership” and “married, not living with spouse”.

Children

People living in families with children are more likely to use informal care than people without children. The children variable is a quantitative variable of the number of children of the respondents.

Area

Area is a binary variable of the place where the respondents live, where the original variable had 5 categories that were combined into two: urban and rural.

Health status

Based on the person's own assessment (self-perceived health with a scale from 1 – excellent to 5 – poor and given that it takes on 5 different values with an approximately symmetrical distribution, this is used in the analyses as a quantitative variable with numerical values from 1 to 5.

Chronic diseases

Health conditions that last longer than 3 months. Chronic conditions records the number of chronic conditions that the respondent lives with and is also treated as a quantitative variable.

ADL

Activities of daily living limitations (ADL) refers to six parameters using the Katz index to record a person's state of health and refers to: 1. walking across the room; 2. dressing; 3. bathing or showering; 4. dining; 5. getting on/off the bed; 6. use of the toilet. ADL was measured on scale from 0 to 6.

IADL

Instrumental activities of daily living limitations (IADL) refers to 8 parameters using the Lawtaon index to assess independent functioning in daily life. They relate to 1. preparing meals; 2. shopping for groceries; 3. making telephone calls; 4. taking medications; 5. managing finances; 6. using transportation; 7. household activities; and 8. dressing and doing laundry. IADL is measured on a scale from 0 to 9 (laundry is a separate category 9).