Impact of gender aspect on self-perceived quality of life of elderly

Quality of Life (QoL) is a complex, scattered and multidimensional approach that depends on an extensive set of biological to psychological indicators passing through various socio-economic interactions. It induces enormous heteroscedasticity among individuals in the way of ageing and spurs difference in each elderly from the other. Most of the researchers attempted either to identify indicators or develop indexes to channelize the multidimensionality towards measuring subjective appraisal of QoL but in depth analysis especially, regarding perception of female elderly is missing, even in the era of feminization of ageing i.e. increasing number of female elderly to old age, particularly in mostly and second mostly populated countries like China and India. This study mainly focuses on the gender dimension along with various socio-economic and health constructs in China and India. There are two objectives. Firstly, to analyze the difference across gender with respect to self-perceived Quality of Life (QoL) in different socio-economic and health related contexts. Secondly, to find out the determinants of QoL and try to find out whether sex is an important factor in this regard. The first section of the study consists of the descriptive statistics across gender in both the countries according to their subjective QoL, which is measured on a five point likert scale and further reduced in a trichotomous scale: Good, Moderate and Poor. In the second section Ordered Logit Regression Model has been adopted. Moreover, in determining the control variables three indexes (co-morbidity index, active daily work index and mood index) have been formulated. In both the countries females have a higher percentage to report about moderate, poor or very poor QoL, while men mostly reported very good or good QoL. The results show that age, active of daily work index, mood index and co-morbidity index have significant impact on QoL. Moreover, for females, the odds of poor QoL versus the combined moderate and good are 0.07597 times lower than for males, given the other variables are held constant.