Understanding Well-Being in Daily Life: Informal Social Support, Depression Risk, and Life Satisfaction Among Chinese Older Adults with Disabilities

Against the backdrop of population aging, the well-being of older adults with disabilities in daily life and its underlying mechanisms has increasingly become an important research topic. Using data from the 2020 wave of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), this study focuses on 509 individuals aged 60 and above with disabilities. It incorporates informal social support, depression risk, and life satisfaction into a unified analytical framework, and employs ordered Logit models, binary Logit models, and the KHB decomposition method to examine their interrelationships and underlying mechanisms. The results show that: (1) informal social support is positively associated with the life satisfaction of older adults with disabilities; (2) informal social support is negatively associated with depression risk; and (3) depression risk is negatively associated with life satisfaction and plays a significant mediating role in the relationship between informal social support and life satisfaction, accounting for 23.25% of the total effect. From a daily life perspective, this study reveals that the well-being of older adults with disabilities is not solely derived from institutional resource provision, but is generated and sustained through ongoing social interactions and relational networks. The study therefore deepens our understanding of the everyday and relational dimensions of subjective well-being in later life.