The Cuban elderly and their service use.

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.