Abstract
It is often assumed that Chinese people tend to have a more positive attitude toward aging and old age than Americans, due to the cultural generalization of collectivism versus individualism. This study aimed to critically examine this assumption by using first-hand empirical data collected in a Chinese and an American university (standardized surveys and in-depth focus group interviews). Respectively, 980 college students in China and 332 college students in the U.S. were recruited for the standardized surveys; whereas two focus-group interviews in each country (4 participants per group) were conducted to collect more in-depth information. Contrary to the common assumption, this study revealed that Chinese students actually hold more negative attitudes toward aging and older people compared to their American peers. It was also found that females tend to hold more positive attitudes than male students across both cultures, though American female students hold more positive attitudes than Chinese female students. Chinese students’ interactions with seniors are often limited to their grandparents whereas American students tend to reach out to non-grandparent seniors in larger communities. Chinese students’ more negative attitudes toward aging and older people may be a result of a combination of educational, social, and economic factors—a higher level of age segregation (geographically, socially, and intellectually) and a lack of gerontological curriculum in Chinese educational system, the caregiving burden faced by the one-child generation compounded with lack of governmental support for caregiving, as well as the rising youth-oriented consumerist culture.
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Notes
Although social welfare programs to address the aging population’s needs are under-developed, Chinese government provides a certain level of pension and health care coverage for most of its urban population, and is now making an effort in extending the coverage to its rural population.
The constitution of 1954 stated that “parents have the duty to rear and educate their minor children, and the adult children have the duty to support and assist their parents.” In 1980, the penal code of 1980 decreed that children can be imprisoned to a maximum of 5 years for neglecting their parents. In 1996, CCP passed Law For the Protection of Elders’ Right (China Law Education Website, 2011), which officially and legally spelled out adult children’s obligations to respect and take care of their aging parents physically, financially, and emotionally. The law formally regulated adult children’s provision for aging parents in terms of housing, medical care, property protection and so on.
As noted above, two variables—interaction with grandparents and interaction with non-grandparent seniors were converted from scale variables to binary variables. The rationale of such adjustments is the low variations within the variables across scales when initially descriptive data analysis was conducted using the 10-scale measurement. Theoretically, it became more meaningful to recode the variables to dichotomous variables to better capture the variations within the variables and thus better predict the dependent variable. It might be that the respondents had a difficult time to quantify these rather abstract concepts and gauge the distance between different scales (e.g. between 6, 7, and 8).
A Chinese person may retire at different ages depending on two factors—whether he/she works for the government and the types of work (office-based job or labor-based job).
All names of the quoted in this section were pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality of the participants.
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Luo, B., Zhou, K., Jin, E.J. et al. Ageism among College Students: A Comparative Study between U.S. and China. J Cross Cult Gerontol 28, 49–63 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-013-9186-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-013-9186-5