Impact of socioeconomic status and health risk on fall inequality among older adults

Socio-economic status (SES) is one of the important indicators reflecting individual social participation and resource allocation, and it plays an important role in individual health shock. Health shock indicates the body being in a non-healthy state, such as illness, injury and death. This study used data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study conducted in 2013, 2015 and 2018 and utilised the panel logit model, causal step-by-step analysis and path analysis to empirically test the impact of SES on fall inequality among the elderly and the mediating effect of health shock. The results demonstrated obvious group inequality in the fall risk among older adults, the core of which was the impact of SES on health, causing health inequality and affecting fall inequality. The activities of daily living and pain rate of the high-income group were 61.16% and 28.69%, respectively, that of the low-income group. The evaluation of good sight and hearing were 3.6833 and 3.8572 times, respectively, that of the low-income group. The non-depressive status was 38.4638 times of the low-income group. The path effect confirmed the mediating role of health shock. Therefore, this study concluded that SES had an important impact on the risk of falls among the elderly, and this impact was mainly from health shock. This study proposed that to reduce the incidence of falls among the elderly, differences in health shock risks among the elderly with different SES must be actively monitored and accurate and effective policy interventions should be implemented from the level of group heterogeneity.