The Effect of Social Integration on Self-rated Health for Elderly Japanese People: A Longitudinal Study1

The current study used the 1999 wave of the Nihon University Japanese Longitudinal Study of Aging to measure intrafamilial and extrafamilial social integration scores for people aged 65-plus, and their self-ranked health reported in follow-up interviews in 2001. An innovation was the usage of ordinal logit regressions of this ordinally-measured dependent variable on the two dimensions of social integration. Higher scores on each dimension of social integration in 1999 predicted more favorable rankings on self-rated health scores in 2001. The five conclusions of this study are: (1) the relationship between social integration and self-rated health did not vanish during the "lost decade" of the 1990s; (2) the relationship is causal; (3) both intrafamilial and extrafamilial dimensions of social integration cause more favorable rankings of self-perceived health; (4) extrafamilial roles have a stronger effect than intrafamilial roles, and (5) the role-enhancement perspective is more useful than the role-strain perspective in understanding the relationship of social integration to health. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]