The Relation between Demographic Characteristics of Communities and Supply of Welfare Services for Elders in Korea

Abstract

Aiming to find some suggestions to develop infrastructure of welfare services for elders in Korea, this study tried to reveal the relation between demographic characteristics of communities and supply of welfare services for elders with using the latest statistical data of Korea. All the 234 communities (local government units) are covered in this study. The demographic characteristics were analyzed by cluster analysis according to the three indicators; population, percentage of elders and household size. The relation of demographic characteristics and welfare services for elders (residential care house, home help service, day service and short stay) was analyzed by some statistical tools such as parametric method; t-test, one-way-layout analysis of variance, multiple comparisons, non-parametric method; Mann-Whitney's U-test and Kruskal-Wallis test. As a result, from the three indicators, all the communities were characterized as "middle-scale city/rural," which includes "sparsely populated area/rural area" and "middle-scale cities," or "mega city," which includes "large-scale cities" and "satellite cities of metropolises." And from the further statistical analysis, it became clear that the supply of the welfare services for elders in Korea is not reflecting the demographic characteristics of each community. Based on the findings from the analysis, this thesis emphasized that it needs to reflect the demographic characteristics of each community in planning welfare service infrastructure development as a part of community-based social welfare planning and it also gave some suggestions for the community-based social welfare planning.