title: Food security for community-living elderly people in Beijing, China.
abstract: Food security has been identified as an important issue for elderly people's quality of life and ageing in place. A food security index composed of three indicators (food intake, food quality and food affordability) was developed to measure the food security status of community-living elderly people. Food security was then examined among community-living elderly in the central urban districts of Beijing, China. Data were collected by a questionnaire survey in the summer of 2013 and the response rate was 78.5%. Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression were applied to analyse food security and the associations between food security and demographic and socioeconomic factors. The results showed that 54.2% of the surveyed elderly experienced food security. Participants with better education (OR = 1.68) and better health (OR = 1.47) were more likely to experience food security. The young-old were less likely to experience food security than the older old (OR = 0.94). Elderly people who lived with their children were less likely to experience food security than those who lived alone (OR = 0.43). The results of impact factors on food security highlight both similarities with studies from more developed countries and the unique challenges faced in a rapidly changing China with its unique social, cultural and political systems. The food security index we developed in this study is a simple and effective measure of food security status, which can be used in surveys for evaluating the food security status of elderly people in the future.
authors.affiliation: School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. chengyang@bnu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rosenberg
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Hua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000068476:Beijing; D002681:China; D005523:Food Supply; D006801:Humans; D011788:Quality of Life; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
keywords: Beijing; community-living elderly people; food programmes; food security