Making Use of Time-Use Data to Estimate Elderly Care Needs

Abstract

The aging population and the increasing need for long-term care for the elderly have led to significant care gaps in countries with underdeveloped care regimes. Social assistance and protection policies to address elderly care needs tend to ignore the costs imposed on households and borne predominantly by women. At the same time, as representative data on the care of the elderly population are not widely available in many countries, it is very difficult to identify needs and estimate demand for elderly care. In this study, we aim to provide estimates of elderly care needs using information provided by time use survey data. Time-use surveys are the main source of information on time spent on care activities, but these surveys are generally repeated every ten years. The Turkish Time Use Survey (TUS) conducted in 2014-2015 includes not only actual time spent on elderly care but also a special module for elderly care in Turkey. In this context, we aim to estimate the demand for elderly care to adapt elderly care patterns to the present based on population statistics and data from the elderly care module of the most recent available data. The methodology we use here can be proposed in other cases with data constraints to identify the need for care.