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Social Support and Wellbeing Among Older Australians

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Measuring, Understanding and Improving Wellbeing Among Older People

Abstract

The authors examine the relationship between social support and subjective wellbeing using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The chapter focuses on measures of social support that reflect the perception of support a person receives from friends and family. The results suggest that social support enhances wellbeing among older people. This finding is robust to alternative ways of measuring wellbeing including the Mental Health Inventory (MHI-5) scale, life satisfaction, depression and Kessler Psychological Distress (K10) scale.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Watson and Wooden (2012) for detail description of the HILDA dataset.

  2. 2.

    For individuals who fell into this age category during subsequent waves of the survey, our study focuses only on waves in which respondents met the age criteria.

  3. 3.

    See Lewbel (2012) for details on how identification is achieved.

  4. 4.

    Appau et al. (2019) find a negative effect of ethnic diversity on social integration in a UK sample.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Samuelson Appau & Sefa Awaworyi Churchill

Authors
  1. Samuelson Appau
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  2. Sefa Awaworyi Churchill
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sefa Awaworyi Churchill .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Sefa Awaworyi Churchill

  2. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Lisa Farrell

  3. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Samuelson Appau

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Description and summary statistics of variables
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Appau, S., Awaworyi Churchill, S. (2020). Social Support and Wellbeing Among Older Australians. In: Awaworyi Churchill, S., Farrell, L., Appau, S. (eds) Measuring, Understanding and Improving Wellbeing Among Older People. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2353-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2353-3_4

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