Urbanism and life satisfaction among the aged

This study examines the impact of urbanism on the causal mechanisms by which life satisfaction is determined. Although the links between the type of community and life satisfaction have been the foci of many studies, the findings are by no means conclusive. Some have found that the rural elderly express greater satisfaction, others have not. Such a discrepancy may be due to (a) the neglect of other variables, (b) a lack of explicit causal specifications, and (c) the failure to distinguish main effects from interaction effects. In this study a causal model that incorporates urbanism as a polytomous variable and its interaction effects has been proposed. The model was evaluated by using four data sets with sample sizes ranging from 961 to 3,996. Urbanism was found to have indirect main effects as well as interaction effects on life satisfaction.