TY - JOUR

T1 - Willingness to provide informal care to older adults in Germany

T2 - a discrete choice experiment

AU - de Jong, Lea

AU - Schmidt, Torben

AU - Stahmeyer, Jona Theodor

AU - Eberhard, Sveja

AU - Zeidler, Jan

AU - Damm, Kathrin

N1 - Funding Information: Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant Number 01EH1603A). The funding body had no role in the design of the study, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data or in the writing of the manuscript.

PY - 2023/4

Y1 - 2023/4

N2 - As the German population is continually aging and the majority of older adults still wish to ‘age in place’, the need for informal care provided by family and friends will correspondingly continue to increase. In addition, while the need for formal (professional) care services is also likely to increase, the supply already does not meet the demand in Germany today. The aim of our study is the elicitation of people’s willingness to provide informal care by means of a discrete choice experiment. The self-complete postal survey was disseminated to a random sample of the German general population in Lower Saxony. Data cleansing resulted in a final sample size of 280 participants. A conditional logit and a latent class model were estimated. All attributes were judged as highly relevant by the respondents. The results revealed that an increase in the care hours per day had the greatest negative impact overall on the willingness to provide informal care in our sample. The marginal willingness-to-accept for 1 h of informal care was €14.54 when having to provide informal care for 8 h in reference to 2 h per day. This value is considerably higher than the national minimum wage of €9.82. A three-class latent class model revealed preference heterogeneity. While a monetary compensation is often discussed to increase the willingness and availability of informal care in a country, our results show that this statement could not be generalized within our entire sample.

AB - As the German population is continually aging and the majority of older adults still wish to ‘age in place’, the need for informal care provided by family and friends will correspondingly continue to increase. In addition, while the need for formal (professional) care services is also likely to increase, the supply already does not meet the demand in Germany today. The aim of our study is the elicitation of people’s willingness to provide informal care by means of a discrete choice experiment. The self-complete postal survey was disseminated to a random sample of the German general population in Lower Saxony. Data cleansing resulted in a final sample size of 280 participants. A conditional logit and a latent class model were estimated. All attributes were judged as highly relevant by the respondents. The results revealed that an increase in the care hours per day had the greatest negative impact overall on the willingness to provide informal care in our sample. The marginal willingness-to-accept for 1 h of informal care was €14.54 when having to provide informal care for 8 h in reference to 2 h per day. This value is considerably higher than the national minimum wage of €9.82. A three-class latent class model revealed preference heterogeneity. While a monetary compensation is often discussed to increase the willingness and availability of informal care in a country, our results show that this statement could not be generalized within our entire sample.

KW - Discrete choice experiment

KW - Elderly care

KW - Long-term care

KW - Older adult care

KW - Preferences

KW - Willingness

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85131744295&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s10198-022-01483-5

DO - 10.1007/s10198-022-01483-5

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85131744295

VL - 24

SP - 425

EP - 436

JO - European Journal of Health Economics

JF - European Journal of Health Economics

SN - 1618-7598

IS - 3

ER -