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Independent variables
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Explanations
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Age
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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.
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Gender
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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.
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Education
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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.
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Income
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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.
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Marital status
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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”.
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Children
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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.
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Area
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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.
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Health status
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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.
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Chronic diseases
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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.
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ADL
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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.
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IADL
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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).
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