A Study on Social Support Life Satisfaction and Participation Experience in Day Care Centres for the Elderly

[[abstract]]With the aging of population in Taiwan , calls for community care emerged, and day care programs for the elderly were developed in every counties. This paper investigates the participation experience and its correlations with social support and life satisfaction among the elderly in communities of Nantou county. Case control design is employed to suit research purpose. Study was conducted with gender, age, job, residence, and educational background as the variables. Sample of case group consists of four non-profit elder day care centers and 54 elderly respondents were interviewed. The control group consists of 54 elderly who never enrolled in day care center but with similar social backgrounds pertaining to sex, age , education, and occupational history in the same communities . Research tools developed include questionnaire containing questions on day care participation history, health conditions, social support and life satisfaction scales. Content of questionnaire was validated by professionals. Reliability was approved by pre-test and item analysis. This study reaches the following conclusions: 1.Marital status and self-perceived health status have selective influence on the enrollment of an elder into day care center. 2.Day care elderly have higher life satisfaction than nonparticipant elderly, even after control for their health conditions. 3.Social background factors including education, occupation history ,residence are correlated with day care elderly participants’ perceptions of program. 4.Financial status correlate positively to the elderly’s social support and life satisfaction; while religion correlate negatively to life satisfaction. Causal inference needs to be cautious for such above correlations. 5.Participating elderly in day care centers tend to have more informal support than control group. Social support for participating elderly come mainly from their spouse, children and daughters-in-law. 6.Day care participation has significantly alleviate the care burden of elder’s non-coresident children when children are elder’s primary caregivers. Suggestions and research restrictions: 1. Suggestions for social authorities: improve access to day care for the minor and medium disabled; enforce service for the elderly. 2. Suggestions for day care centers: Remote day care centers need to work on the problem of inconvenient transportation; day care programs need to take diversified learning programs into consideration; day care centers could install elder facilities; they require professional medical care to take care of patients having dementia. 3. Suggestions for elder caregiver and relatives: Encourage couples to develop common hobbies and interests; pay more attention to how well the elderly do in day care centers. 4.Suggestions for future study: Get access to elderly name lists from population administration authorities to save time finding individual cases; it’s optimal to conduct an interview with the primary caregivers