A comparative study on sociodemographic changes and long-term health care needs of the elderly in Japan and South Korea

This study compares the sociodemographic changes and long-term health care needs of the elderly in Japan and South Korea. More specifically, this study deals with demographic transition, urbanization, population aging, changing family structure, and cross-cultural analysis of sociodemographic aspects of the elderly in Japan and South Korea. This study also examines activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) and conditions of selected items of long-term health care needs of the elderly in Japan and South Korea. This study uses the data from the surveys done in Japan and South Korea, where the same sets of questions were employed at the same time in 1998. The sample size for the Japanese data is 1673 and that of Korean data is 568. A cross-sectional analysis of the Japanese and Korean frail elderly using the 1998 survey data indicates that the proportions of those who are able to do ADLs and IADLs are much greater among the Japanese elderly than the Korean elderly. The analysis also shows that the proportion of the frail elderly who lie down partly or always is much higher among Koreans than Japanese despite the fact that the mean age of Korean respondents is much lower than that of Japanese respondents. Comparing the long-term health care needs of the Japanese and Korean elderly, we may conclude that sociodemographic status of any individual country in conjunction with socioeconomic environment would significantly affect long-term health care needs of the elderly. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.