Subjective Health Well-Being in Older Adults

Abstract

The research aimed to identify the subjective health well-being of the elderly, and to identify the differences in subjective health well-being according to gender (males and females) and economic status (poor - average - good) among the elderly.

The research community included all elderly residents in nursing homes, where their number reached (606) elderly, including (331) men and (275) women in (13) homes distributed over (9) governorates, with one government home in each governorate, except for Baghdad Governorate, which has two government homes and three private homes.

The research sample consisted of the elderly who were selected from the current research community using the simple random method, with a size of (194) from each nursing home, and the number of elderly males reached (103) and (91) elderly females.

The (Healthy Subjective Well-Being) scale prepared by Van der Linden (2011) was adopted, which consists of (56) paragraphs distributed over nine areas of healthy subjective well-being, namely:

Independence

1- Movement

2- Psychological balance

3-Self-acceptance

4- Independence

5-Optimism

6-Self-development

7-Acceptance of the situation

8-Satisfaction with the balance between obligations and free time.

After presenting the scale to experts in psychology for the purpose of obtaining apparent validity, (26) paragraphs were retained. It was built using the Likert method, and consists of four alternatives: (It always happens, It happens often, It happens sometimes, It doesn't happen), and the alternatives were given scores (1-4) respectively for the paragraphs that tend towards the concept.

The reliability of the scale was obtained through the (Cronbach's alpha) method, and it was at a value of (0.091), which is a very high reliability coefficient that can be relied upon.

The research results showed

That the research sample has a higher than average level of subjective health. The results also showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the level of self-health according to the economic status, as well as the absence of a statistically significant interaction between gender and economic status.