The Impact of Sanitation Infrastructure and Health of the Elderly

Urbanisation is rapidly transforming China's landscape, bringing forth challenges in sanitation management, especially for the elderly population. As China's elderly population grows, ensuring suitable living conditions becomes essential. This research focuses on investigating the relationship between sanitation infrastructure and elderly health using longitudinal data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). The study's significance lies in its potential to shape targeted interventions for the unique needs of each community, enhancing sanitation infrastructure and services for the elderly. The thesis reveals strong associations between sanitation features and health outcomes using chi-square test, Cramer's V and regression analysis. The regression model demonstrated the predictive power of sanitation infrastructure on household health, highlighting main toilet type as most impactful, which agrees to the chi-square test used in this research. The critical chi-square values obtained for the association between sanitation and health status strengthen the argument that there is a relationship between sanitation infrastructure and health status.