Outcome variable: middle-aged and older adults’ mental health
The main outcome variable in this paper is the mental health of middle-aged and older adults in rural China. Following existing studies [43 (link),50 (link)], the mental health index is derived from the 6-item short form of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies of Depression (CES-D) in the CFPS. (CES-D questions: 1. How often did you feel depressed that nothing could cheer you up during the past 30 days? 2. How often did you feel nervous during the past days? 3. How often did you feel restless or fidgety during the past 30 days? 4. How often did you feel hopeless during the past 30 days? 5. How often did you feel that everything was an effort during the past 30 days? 6. How often did you feel that life was meaningless during the past 30 days? Individuals were asked to indicate the frequency of their feelings on a five-scale metric—“Almost daily”, “Often”, “Half of the time”, “Sometimes”, and “Never”. These responses are coded from 1 to 5, respectively). The response for each question is coded from 1 to 5. There are six questions to assess mental state in the survey, and each one is constructed and standardized to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The final score is calculated by aggregating the multiple measures into indices. The higher the index value, the better the individual’s mental health.
Independent variable: natural disaster
We consider two measures of natural disaster as the independent variable. The first one is captured by a dummy variable (Disaster_d). It equals 1 if the middle-aged or older adult has experienced at least one type of natural disaster, and otherwise 0. (The types of natural disasters include typhoons, floods, storm surges, forest fires, frost, hail, landslides, debris flow, earthquakes, infectious diseases, agricultural and forestry pests, etc.). The second is constructed as a continuous variable (Disaster_n), which measures the number of types of natural disaster that the middle-aged or older adult has experienced.
Control variables and descriptive statistics
We include the following control variables: age, a dummy variable for sex, education level, marital status, cognitive abilities, income, medical insurance, and a dummy variable for agricultural production. In addition, we control for family size, house value, and family expenditure. Descriptive statistics of the variables used in the paper are reported inTable 1 , where it can be seen that the sampled middle-aged and older adults were 58.41 years old on average, and 50.4 percent of them were male. The average mental health score is −0.339. About 75 percent of middle-aged and older adults have experienced at least one type of natural disaster. The value of Disaster_n varies from 0 to 5. That is to say, the most types of disasters that have been experienced by a person is 5, and the least is 0 in our sample.
The main outcome variable in this paper is the mental health of middle-aged and older adults in rural China. Following existing studies [43 (link),50 (link)], the mental health index is derived from the 6-item short form of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies of Depression (CES-D) in the CFPS. (CES-D questions: 1. How often did you feel depressed that nothing could cheer you up during the past 30 days? 2. How often did you feel nervous during the past days? 3. How often did you feel restless or fidgety during the past 30 days? 4. How often did you feel hopeless during the past 30 days? 5. How often did you feel that everything was an effort during the past 30 days? 6. How often did you feel that life was meaningless during the past 30 days? Individuals were asked to indicate the frequency of their feelings on a five-scale metric—“Almost daily”, “Often”, “Half of the time”, “Sometimes”, and “Never”. These responses are coded from 1 to 5, respectively). The response for each question is coded from 1 to 5. There are six questions to assess mental state in the survey, and each one is constructed and standardized to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The final score is calculated by aggregating the multiple measures into indices. The higher the index value, the better the individual’s mental health.
Independent variable: natural disaster
We consider two measures of natural disaster as the independent variable. The first one is captured by a dummy variable (Disaster_d). It equals 1 if the middle-aged or older adult has experienced at least one type of natural disaster, and otherwise 0. (The types of natural disasters include typhoons, floods, storm surges, forest fires, frost, hail, landslides, debris flow, earthquakes, infectious diseases, agricultural and forestry pests, etc.). The second is constructed as a continuous variable (Disaster_n), which measures the number of types of natural disaster that the middle-aged or older adult has experienced.
Control variables and descriptive statistics
We include the following control variables: age, a dummy variable for sex, education level, marital status, cognitive abilities, income, medical insurance, and a dummy variable for agricultural production. In addition, we control for family size, house value, and family expenditure. Descriptive statistics of the variables used in the paper are reported in
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