Empirical studies on use of services by the elderly are absent from the research
literature. Existing studies are concerned primarily with health service use rather
than social service use by special population groups. Moreover, most aging
Hispanic utilization research has been descriptive instead of attempting to develop
and test structural models that explain service use behavior. Our purpose is to
develop and evaluate, via path analysis, a model of social service use by the Cuban
elderly. We use a framework that Andersen and Newman (1973) proposed to
categorize the variables employed. The findings indicate that the enabling factors
(awareness of social service and annual family income) and the predisposing
factors (nativity, age, and age density) take on greater importance in directly
predicting social service use than need for social services.
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