Extending TPB to Silver Economy Occupations: Youth Career Intention in Beijing’s Senior Companion Service

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_9How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Silver economy; Senior Companion service; Career choice intention; Theory of Planned Behavior; Latent profile analysis; Machine learning interpretability

Abstract

Population aging has intensified demand for Senior Companion services, yet youth remain severely underrepresented in the eldercare workforce. No prior study has examined this emerging occupation through the lens of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). This study extends TPB by introducing government support as an institutional variable and examines its direct and indirect effects on career intention. A multi-layer framework integrating SEM, latent profile analysis (LPA), XGBoost-SHAP, and importance-performance analysis (IPA) was applied to 988 Beijing youth aged 16–35. Results showed excellent model fit (χ² /df=1.084, CFI=0.998, RMSEA=0.009). Government support emerged as the dominant predictor (β = 0.314, p < 0.001), with indirect effects accounting for 59% of its total influence. LPA revealed three cognitive profiles—structural low-recognition (21.46%), high integrated-recognition (33.81%), and cautious-evaluative (44.74%).

XGBoost achieved R²=0.830 with cross-validation, and SHAP decomposition revealed distinct driver configurations across profiles. Text mining identified compensation (476 occurrences) and training (445) as dominant keywords; Word2Vec clustering revealed four semantic appeal dimensions: compensation-policy (cosine 0.951), training-quality (0.940), career development-recognition (0.905), and work model (0.863). Subjective norms were identified as a priority intervention target across all profiles. These findings extend TPB application to emerging eldercare occupations and offer evidence-based guidance for silver economy workforce development.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yuhui Bao
AU  - Yanhua Dong
AU  - Guangqiong Wang
AU  - Zilin Shan
AU  - Juncheng Liu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/30
TI  - Extending TPB to Silver Economy Occupations: Youth Career Intention in Beijing’s Senior Companion Service
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 8th International Conference on Economic Management and Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 68
EP  - 77
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_9
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_9
ID  - Bao2026
ER  -