The purpose of the research is to explore the forms of support provided by informal support networks of spouse, adult children, relatives, friends and neighbours for older persons in Macau. The research also attempts to identify the elements that contribute to life satisfaction among active older persons. As little research has been conducted in Macau, this study tries to introduce data and possible suggestions for initiatives in elderly policy in this area. The thesis adopts mainly a qualitative approach in exploring the possible informal support elements that contribute to life satisfaction as perceived by active older persons. Sixty-five in depth interviews with 40 female and 25 male older persons aged from 65 to 90 invited as respondents, all of whom were active and of good health status, were conducted either in old age centers or older persons’ apartments from late July to Mid October in Macau. Triangulation of various sources, the sources of data was employed to cross-check the validity of the initial explanations derived included two focus group discussions, key informant interviews, a review of the published literature, independent member checking as well as content analysis with correlation analysis. Content analysis using open and axial coding identified four major types of support: tangible support, informational support, companionship support and emotional support. The research revealed that children and a spouse mainly provided emotional and tangible support. Companionship support was mainly provided by friends. Information support came the last, and was only important when it comes to crucial issues such as going to hospital, or when wishing to apply for specific services. In terms of the sources of informal support, the findings indicated that adult children are regarded as the primary reliable persons who provided various forms of support for their older parents. This care and support was regarded as obligatory in nature. The second primary support source was spousal. Spouses provided personal daily care for each other. Friends mainly provided companionship support and the support is voluntary in nature. Perhaps unexpectedly, the research found that relatives provided the least frequent support due to distance and sometimes relationships were poor. With respect to the relationship between informal support and life satisfaction, the results obtained by a series of correlation analysis reviewed that being concerned and cared for, respected, providing money for daily necessities, meetings and decisions-making by children are important for older persons and are statistically significant to life satisfaction. The support provided by children can create a sense of security and well being associated with life satisfaction. The mutual care by a spouse creates a sense of security and in turn enhances life satisfaction. Friends provided companionship support in terms of chatting, and participating in social activities, which enrich life quality and contribute to life satisfaction. It is notable that relatives’ support did not contribute very much to life satisfaction. This research suggests the value of strengthening community care services by providing old age allowance, promoting intergeneration education and encouraging older persons to be active in participating in social activities. These can enhance the well being of older persons in Macau. Social policy for older persons should potentially aim at achieving this end.

There are increasing studies looking at effects of caregiving to the frail elderly in Hong Kong. However, many studies often focus only on a single dimension of caregiving in either informal or formal carers without the focus on the elderly that receiving cares. Few studies have viewed elder caregiving as an integrative and dynamic approach, with limited examination and exploration on the caring processes and interactions between the formal and informal carers and elderly carees, and the reasons for this pattern. Thus a caregiving triad might be considered as consisting of the elderly caree, the formal and informal carer, and a tripartite model could be adopted to explore the interactions and interrelationship between the three parties. The present research aimed to explore the changing caring relationships among carers and carees in home-based setting; the meanings behind the different caring patterns amongst the formal informal carers as well as the elderly carees and; to provide suggestions and implications for providing better care services for elderly recipients in home-based setting. The methods used in the present study are mainly qualitative in approach, with in-depth interviews and focus group discussion. In order to ensure the credibility of the research, triangulation of various data sources is used to provide fuller picture and understanding of the research findings. Since this is an exploratory study, a small sample was used (N=18). In order to get a deeper understanding of the caregiving process and patterns, in-depth interviews with elderly people, their family caregivers and the formal caregivers were conducted in this study. The interviews were guided by a theoretical framework with interview guidelines. Thematic analysis was used to explore the caring relationships and pattern. A total of 6 cases with 18 people (6 elderly people, 6 family caregivers and 6 formal caregivers) were successfully interviewed from June to September 2003. The present study found that between the informal and formal carers, substituting and complementing effect are the most obvious through the interaction pattern. The substituting effect mainly comes from the perception of quality services by the informal carers and they think that professional and advanced care services are better to be provided by formal carers. Regarding the complementing effect, it is found that sharing of tasks between the formal and informal carers are common through the research. Informal carers might share tasks to formal carers when they did not have time to do. Tangible supports are more often supported by formal carers and both formal and informal carers would provide intangible support. On the side of carers and carees, both formal and informal carers are found to interact in a form of reciprocal and obligation. The continuation of care of informal carers is mainly due to the martial relationship and filial piety. The caring meanings of formal carers are varies, including the economic reward, gratification and job satisfaction and also the caring can benefit their personal growth and development. The findings shed some light on the roles played by the three parties. It was necessary for all parties to cooperate in striving for the best quality of care. Hence more information of the perceived roles and expectations among the three parties should be further explored in order to get the optimal caring patterns. Since the optimum form of the caring relationships depends very much on the community resources available and also on the values upheld by the three parties, to achieve the greatest satisfaction of them and enhancing their quality of life, it is advisable to conduct further study on their expectations towards the caring tasks, process, and relationship while advocating their empowerment in the continuum of care.

Volunteering has been widely accepted as potentially a very good means to engage older persons and to maximize their contribution to society. There is a need to understand the entire process of volunteering, the reasons that motivate older persons to participate in volunteer services and activities and to appreciate why committed elderly volunteers continue to involve themselves in volunteering. The present study attempts to explore the possible motivational and sustainable aspects in the process of volunteering guided by a social reinforcement perspective. It further aims to propose an explanatory model for the initiation and sustainability of volunteering involving older persons in Hong Kong. A theoretical framework of the study focuses on the social reinforcement perspective within the cognitive-behavioral approach in explaining the volunteering process in terms of antecedences, pre-conditions, actual experience and consequences of volunteering. A questionnaire was distributed to explore the different aspects of volunteering, including the patterns of volunteer services, volunteer involvement, reasons for and effects of volunteering and personal profile of the volunteers. The target of the study was hospital volunteers aged 60 or above. The research design was a mail questionnaire survey using self-administered procedures. A total of 287 elderly respondents, 63 men and 224 women aged 60 to 86 years, drawn from the database of the Hospital Authority were assessed. The response rate was 30.3% with 1,359 valid responses. The study showed that older volunteers satisfied the pre-conditions for volunteering, such as having good health, free time and financial stable. The present study revealed that a great majority (74%) of the older volunteer respondents was inspired by altruistic reasons of wanting to help and to feel contented and approximately half were initially motivated by the altruistic motive of social responsibility. Social motives of seeking social exposure, making new friends and sharing of experiences were other important initial reasons. These factors were sustained when respondents reported the reasons for their continued participation in volunteering. The respondents perceived obvious positive changes in physical, psychological, cognitive and social well-being and they were satisfied and gratified with the volunteering experiences. The research also revealed the positive changes in volunteer’s life satisfaction, exposure and experience, self-appraisal and confidence. The positive outcomes of volunteering, such as enhanced self-esteem, life satisfaction and personal exposure help to affirm the initial intention of volunteering, which in turn reinforces the continual participation in volunteer services with the evidence of consistent findings of both initial and continual participation in volunteering.

The present study investigates to what extent the life events, which includes self-perceived health, self-esteem, internal locus of control and coping effectiveness as indicators, could explain the occurrence of positive affect and depression amongst these elderly persons. The relationships between life events, self-esteem-level, internal locus of control, coping effectiveness, and psychological well-being among older persons (aged 60 or above) in Hong Kong are examined. Eight pilot study cases have been carried out in order to test for the validity of the research instrument. One hundred and three elderly respondents were successfully interviewed face-to-face from three main estates in Tseung Kwan O district, a new-town area in Eastern New Territories in Hong Kong: Po Lam Estate1 (N = 46), Tsui Lam Estate (N = 36), and King Lam Estate (N = 21). In exploring the life events of respondents over the half year past, a checklist (23 life items) was used. These items covered most of the events which are commonly found in an elderly cohort. In exploring the psychological well-being of the respondents, concepts were operationalized into 14 questions (9 items for positive affect and 5 items for depression), which were devised by Lawton (1987), to cover two constructs (i.e. positive affect and depression). The reliability for positive affect reached 0.91 (alpha), for depression reached 0.90 (alpha). Self-esteem levels of the respondents were measured by using the Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (alpha = 0.84). Locus of control (9 items) was measured by an instrument devised by Siu (1998) and the reliability was 0.87 (alpha). Respondents’ coping effectiveness was assessed by an instrument (13 items) which was originally developed by Moos, Cronkite, Billings and Finney (1996) and modified by the researcher for the present study. The instrument covered four constructs (i.e. problem focus, avoidance, positive appraisal and emotional discharge) and their reliabilities ranged from 0.39 to 0.47 (alpha). The results of the study show that the average life events score of the respondents was 84.66 with the standard deviation 55.50, which means that generally they are at low stress level due to the occurrence of life events. Age-associated change in subjective health was very small in the study. Respondents showed a positive sense of personal worth and have medium level of internal locus of control. They tended to use more positive coping strategies to solve their problem, but the use of those coping strategies was not frequent. With regards to coping effectiveness, the study shows that there are gender differences. Female respondents thought that being more objective to problems did not help to solve them, whereas male respondents tended to think that emotion-focused coping strategies did not help to solve problems. Moreover, respondents showed both low level of positive affect and depression. No significant correlation has been found between life events and positive affect, but there is significant correlation between life events and depression. The study supports previous researches that show self-perceived health, self-esteem, and internality are significantly correlated with psychological well-being. However, only few coping strategies USE/HELP and coping effectiveness are partially correlated with psychological well-being. There are some intervening effects of self-esteem and internal locus of control found in the relationship between life events and psychological well-being. However, no intervening effect of coping strategies USE has been found in such a relationship, and only avoidance coping effectiveness showed a intervening (moderating) effect on the relationship between life events and positive affect. No intervening effect was found in the life events-psychological well-being model. However, some coping USE and effectiveness showed intervening (mediating) effects in the self-esteem-psychological well-being model and internality-psychological well-being model. Further studies are necessary to enforce the roles of the main variables in the proposed framework.

Film watching is a popular leisure activity in modern society. Films, as a medium, provide powerful tools to deliver social messages and to create images of particular social groups. The cinematic images portrayed by films toward a particular social group may consequently shape our social perceptions and expectations of that social group. The ways that cinematic images portray older persons are, therefore, a potentially major source for detecting social values and views about them. As some cinematic images tend to reflect social attitudes and behaviours, the present research aimed at investigating how popular films portray the images of older persons. Focus was on the examination of: 1) the representation of older persons in Hong Kong movies, 2) whether older persons are positively or negatively portrayed in movies, and 3) any changes in the cinematic images of older persons over the last two decades. The present research examined Hong Kong movies released between 1981 and 2001. The population of the present study is the most popular Hong Kong movies, based on the turnover of the Hong Kong ticket offices. The sampled films were derived from the three highest-turnover movies for each year from 1981 to 2001. Content analysis was employed in this study to determine the representation and images of older persons in the 63 sampled movies. Generally speaking, older persons were found to be under-represented in the sampled movies relative to their presence in the population. Older persons were portrayed as having white hair, wrinkle skin, and walk independently in terms of physical appearance. Older persons were also portrayed as having generally good health status. However, older persons were portrayed to have a decline in both family status and socio-economic status in the 1990s as compared to that of the 1980s. In terms of occupation, most older persons were portrayed as retired persons in the movies. Apart from these features, the present research also found that there was a gender differences in the portrayal of older persons. Many older persons were depicted in the movies in the home setting, perhaps reinforcing traditional Asian family values and stereotypes. However, this perhaps underplays older persons’ active roles and contributions in the light of such current concepts as productive and active aging. There is a temporal division in that older persons in many movies of the 1980s were portrayed as more home-based while, in the 1990s, they were becoming more actively involved in external activities.

With the effects of social changes, family values have changed and tensions and contradictions are probably more likely to occur among family members. According to the intergenerational ambivalence perspective, intergenerational relationships are inherently structured so as to generate ambivalence. Ambivalence means the contradictions in the relationships between older parents and adult children that cannot be reconciled. Individuals are expected to use various strategies in their attempts to manage ambivalence at least temporarily. Older women, who often have different life experiences than older men given the influence of traditional Chinese culture, are the focus of this research. The present study aims to explore the expectations of older mothers with respect to four specific features: marriage, childbearing, social support and living arrangements of their adult children and how tensions and contradictions arise in their relationships. It also attempts to identify any adaptive strategies that older mothers use to manage the contradictions in the relations with their adult children. A focus group discussio n was conducted as an exploratory stage to help design subsequent qualitative interviews. Fifteen married mothers aged 65 and above with at least one living child aged 18 years and above were invited to undertake in-depth interviews selected via a snowball sampling method in conjunction with the Fu Tai elderly center in Tuen Mun, Hong Kong. The findings suggest that contradictions occurred when adult children remained single, childless or provided insufficient social support to their mothers. Tensions were found when older mothers received unsolicited assistance and shared the same household with their adult children. Guided by the norm of non- interference, older mothers were found to use several constructive strategies to ignore, accept or rationalize the contradictions in the relations with adult children. Destructive strategies such as overt conflicts were generally avoided to prevent intergenerational relationships from disruption. This research suggests older women demonstrated active roles in managing the tensions and contradictions in the parent-adult children relationships. They reconstructed traditional family values and adapted to the changes in the intergenerational relationships. However, their adaptive abilities depend greatly on their options or resources. Interventions from the government and the community are to be expected to help older people to adapt and achieve active and successful ageing.

No description available.

The rapidly ageing global population reminds us to pay attention to the psychology of ageing. As research on materialism among older people is rare, this study aimed to explore the relationships between materialism and life satisfaction among older people in Hong Kong, a rapidly ageing Chinese society. It also suggested a novel concept – intergenerational material expectations (IME) – to understand older people’s material expectations regarding their children. The data were compared with a younger group to find out if age differences existed. The study was a survey design among two age groups: older people aged 65+ and younger people aged 15-34. Questionnaires were collected from 170 older people aged 65+ and 186 youths aged 15-34. The Material Value Scale, the Satisfaction with Life Scale and a newly constructed scale measuring intergenerational material expectations (IME) were used. Multiple regression, ANCOVA and t-test were used for data analysis. After controlling for gender, age, education level and socio-economic status: 1) materialism and IME were positively related; 2) both materialism and IME were negatively related to life satisfaction (correlations between IME and life satisfaction disappear after controlling for self materialism); 3) older people scored higher on IME than on materialism; and 4) materialism was significantly lower among the older people than the younger. Although older respondents scored lower on materialism than younger respondents, it was still negatively correlated with life satisfaction. The higher IME score may imply that older people would transmit their material aspirations to their offspring as an expression of generative concerns. Future research might investigate if IME exists in other cultures and how older people’s expectations of their children would affect their well-being.

Objective. To examine the feasibility of family participation in a nurse-supported, multicomponent intervention program for delirium prevention in the older hospitalized adult. Background. Delirium is the leading complication of hospitalization for older adults and is associated with important consequences including increased morbidity and mortality, increased use of health care resources, and increased caregiver burden. The potential role that family caregivers could play in delirium prevention and how nurses could facilitate family participation has been largely unexplored. The Calgary Family Intervention Model (CFIM), operating on the assumptions of a family-centered care philosophy, provided a framework for understanding the feasibility of family participation in delirium prevention efforts. Methods. A descriptive exploratory design using a convenience sample of 15 family caregivers of older hospitalized adults at a large teaching hospital was used to address the research questions. For the Family Participation Delirium Prevention Program (FPDPP), family caregivers implemented five intervention protocols targeted toward four baseline risk factors for delirium and self-tracked daily intervention completion. Feasibility was based on rates of intervention completion, and consideration of the barriers and facilitators for participation based on older adults’ and family caregivers’ responses on discharge questionnaires and staff nurses’ responses on a questionnaire. Results. Intervention completion was highest for the orientation protocol (83.5%), followed by the vision protocol (81.5%), therapeutic activities protocol (76.9%), hearing protocol (73.6%), and early mobilization protocol (55.3%). Three themes emerged on the barriers and facilitators for family participation: therapeutic relationships, partnership, and environment. The barriers and facilitators were generally consistent with the concept of family-centered care as described in the CFIM. Conclusion. Based on the rates of intervention completion, it appears that the FPDPP is feasible for implementation in clinical practice. A remarkable level of agreement was found on the concept of the feasibility of family participation among older adult patients, family caregivers, and staff nurses with the common themes that emerged. Key to its successful implementation will be recognition and attention to the barriers and facilitators for participation. In addition, operating from a framework of family-centered care, nurses can advocate for environments that support family caregivers’ participation in a delirium prevention program.

Screenning of old people is very important from the point of evaluating their independence. Such screenning was performed in Slowakia for the first time ever.