Physical limitations, depressive symptoms and cognitive problems: exploring the complex structure of un-health among older people in Italy

Marco Fuscaldo ()

Center for the Analysis of Public Policies (CAPP) from Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Economia "Marco Biagi"

Abstract: Although health has always been a multidimensional concept, the research on older people health has been mostly focused on specific dimension or disease, studied one at a time. The present work aims at understanding the complex associations among different indicators of older people fs un health in Italy. In order to reach this purpose, the work uses the Italian panel of the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and explores the associations among a wide range of indicators of health problems by applying a series of Confirmative Factor Analysis. Differences between men and women and between a numbers of age groups of old people are systematically scrutinized. Finally, a SEM is carried out in order to map the inter ]relations of the retained un health dimensions across time. The preferred representation of the data is a nested model that identified one global factor, which related to all manifest indicators, and four residual factors that measured the specific experiences of physical impairment, cognitive problems, affective suffering and motivational difficulties. The findings confirm the invariance of the proposed nested latent structure across time and improve our understanding about how health dimensions are connected over time.

Keywords: health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages 31
Date: 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mod:cappmo:0098

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