Table 3.
Caregivers’ mental health functions
| Non-working | Irregular employees | |
|---|---|---|
| Dependent variables | Serious mental distress (13 ≤ K6) | |
| Independent variables | ||
| Mental health (−1) (1 = moderate, 2 = serious) | 0.498*** | 0.381*** |
| (0.0697) | (0.0609) | |
| Mental health (initial) | 0.478*** | 0.346*** |
| (0.0863) | (0.0718) | |
| m(proxy of formal care use) | −115.3*** | −49.58* |
| (36.30) | (28.14) | |
| High-intensity caregiving (HI) | 1.234** | −0.208 |
| (0.496) | (1.148) | |
| Generalized residual (GR) | −0.684* | 0.0828 |
| (0.372) | (0.922) | |
| HI × GR | 0.00418 | 0.143 |
| (0.395) | (0.810) | |
| Care leave | −0.181 | |
| (0.163) | ||
| Health status | ||
| Difficulty in daily life activities | 0.487*** | 0.279** |
| (0.108) | (0.111) | |
| Hospitalization during the past year | 0.605** | 0.188 |
| (0.252) | (0.274) | |
| Diabetes | 0.159 | 0.223 |
| (0.156) | (0.139) | |
| Heart disease | 0.299 | 0.487*** |
| (0.200) | (0.170) | |
| Cerebral stroke | −0.236 | −0.0761 |
| (0.302) | (0.348) | |
| Hypertension | −0.0266 | 0.160 |
| (0.144) | (0.118) | |
| Hyperlipidemia | −0.0348 | 0.0595 |
| (0.135) | (0.107) | |
| Having friends/acquaintances | −0.184 | −0.360*** |
| (0.114) | (0.116) | |
| Constant | 1.466 | 0.313 |
| (1.503) | (1.212) | |
| lnσu 2 | −1.231** | −1.438** |
| (0.531) | (0.634) | |
| σu | 0.540*** | 0.487*** |
| (0.143) | (0.154) | |
| Intra-class correlation (σu 2/(1 + σu 2)) | 0.226 | 0.192 |
| Likelihood-ratio test of ρ = 0 [chi2(1)] | 6.19 | 3.88 |
| Prob ≥ chi2 | 0.00 | 0.02 |
| Log-likelihood | −637.77 | −830.43 |
| N | 2785 | 3448 |
Mental health (initial) refers to high-intensity caregiving in 2005. m(X) means the time-average of a time-variant explanatory variable (X)
Age, care recipients, educational attainment, marital status, medication or doctor’s consultation, residence, sex, and having cancer were included as covariates
Standard errors in parentheses. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1