Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Elder caregiving has become one of the social issues of contemporary East Asian societies due to participation of women into the labor market, changing social values towards welfare provision, and the demographic and social repercussion of an ageing population. Using individual-level data of the 2012 CGSS, 2012 JGSS and 2012 KGSS, this paper will highlight the existence of conﬂicting gender ideology and shed light on how families think about eldercare responsibility in a context of changing gender and family norms and of shifting elder eldercare responsibility from the private to the public sphere in China, Japan, and South Korea. Based on theories of modernization, binary logistic analysis is conducted to investigate whether socio-demographic, family structure, and gender ideology affect people’s attitude towards eldercare responsibility. Tentative estimation results indicate that, the eldercare responsibility between China, Japan, and South Korea are divergent. Gender ideology plays a significant role in adult children’s attitudes towards eldercare responsibility, followed by level and change of income, age and education, effects of other factors being qualitatively in line with prior expectations. Modernization hasn’t fully changed the eldercare responsibility tradition in major East Asian societies. The co-existence of tradition and modern values is the impetus for the continuity of family support in East Asia.