Table 1.
Definitions and Descriptive Statistics of Independent and Dependent Variables
| Variables | Definitions | Obs | Min | Max | Mean | SD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dependent variables | ||||||
| Utilization of medical preventive health care (MP) | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual received preventive health service, such as health examination, blood test, blood pressure screening, tumor screening in the last four weeks | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.0336 | 0.1801 |
| Practice of non-medical healthy lifestyle | Dummy variable = 1 if the respondent was a non-smoker, did not consume alcohol in the past year, maintained healthy food choices and performed regular physical activity | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.1650 | 0.3712 |
| Independent variables | ||||||
| Age | Continuous variable of age (years) of the individual | 9773 | 17 | 99 | 48.82 | 15.34 |
| Female | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual was female | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.5244 | 0.4943 |
| High education | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual had lower-middle school education | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.2450 | 0.4301 |
| Urban residence | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual lived in an urban area | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.3433 | 0.4748 |
| Medical insurance | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual had medical insurance | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.4936 | 0.5000 |
| Low household income pc | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual's per capita household is in the lowest quartile | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.2508 | 0.4345 |
| High household income pc | Dummy variable = 1 if the individual's per capita household is in the highest quartile | 9773 | 0 | 1 | 0.2500 | 0.4332 |
| Distance to the nearest facility | Continuous variable that indicates distance in kilometers from home to nearest medical facility | 9773 | 0 | 6.5 | 0.3294 | 0.8327 |
| Number of facilities | Continuous variable, number of facilities in the community | 9773 | 1 | 10 | 2.379 | 1.286 |
| Per capita income of the community | Continuous variable, per capita income (in 1,000 RMB yuan) of the community | 9773 | 400 | 14400 | 3857 | 2047 |
Note: Before recoding into related variables listed in the table, missing values of education, per capita income of the household, distance to the nearest facility, per capita income of the community were replaced with the mean.
Source: Authors' estimations based on CHNS (2006).