Relationship between basic activities of daily life and psychological well-being in ageing

Name of the Project

Relationship between basic activities of daily life and psychological well-being in ageing

Dates

01/05/2009 - 30/04/2010

Coordinating Organization

University of Valencia (Spain)

Participating Organizations

University of Valencia (Spain)

Name of the Call

Aids for Special Actions UV-AE-09-5356 (in Valencian: Ajudes per a Accions Especials UV-AE-09-5356)

Goals

The project aims to analyze the existing relationship between physical and psychological elements that directly affect the quality of life in ageing. In this way, it is intended to analyze the level of basic activities of daily life, as well as psychological and subjective well-being in order to establish which of these variables are significantly related and what characteristics they have. Objectives: to analyze if there are changes in subjective and psychological well-being due to age. To analyze the changes produced in daily-life activities when ageing. To analyze the relationship between measures of psychological and subjective well-being and those of basic activities of daily life. To determine if the dependency has a direct relation with the age, the well-being and the basic activities of the daily life.

Content

With regard to working hypotheses, we intend to verify that:

• With ageing, there are decreases in psychological well-being of people, especially in the dimensions of purpose in life and personal growth;
• The dimensions most related to subjective well-being, self-acceptance and positive relationships with others remain stable with age, even in old age;
• The domain dimension of the environment will maintain strong relationships with the level of basic activities of daily life;
• Basic activities of daily life increase the range of problematic physical areas as the age increases;
• And there is a strong concomitance, specific in these ages, between the level of well-being and the level of basic activities of daily life as well as with dependence.

In relation to the research design, this was a cross-sectional survey study in which the sample will be composed of approximately 500 subjects of the Valencian Community over 65 and not institutionalized. A sampling by quotas will be stratified according to age. For the collection of data for this research, a template with different sociodemographic elements was also used: the Life Satisfaction Index (LSI-A) of Neugarten, Havighurst and Tobin (1961) in the Spanish version developed by Stock, Okun and Gómez (1994), the Ryff Psychological Wellbeing scales (in Spanish: EBR) (Ryff, 1989), selecting the 84-item version, which in the Spanish context has been used by Triadó (2003), Triadó, Villar and Osuna (2005), Triadó, Villar, Solé and Celdrán (2007) with satisfactory results and which is composed of six factors: autonomy, environment domain, personal growth, positive relationships with others, self-acceptance and purpose in life. Finally, the Barthel Index (Mahoney and Barthel, 1965) will be applied as a basic activity measure of daily life, selecting the Spanish adaptation of Batzán et al. (1993). With regard to the start-up, once the sample was collected, the corresponding univariate and multivariate analyzes were carried out. The statistical techniques used include structural equation models, confirmatory factor analysis and logistic regression.

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