Meanings of successful aging, self rated health and perceived social support in community dwellling elderly

• Autor(a) principal: Rosa,Fernanda Heringer Moreira
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Outros Autores: Cupertino,Ana Paula Fabrino Bretas, Neri,Anita Liberalesso
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Geriatrics, Gerontology and Aging (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://ggaging.com/details/307
• topic: Successful aging, health-self-rated, social support-self-rated, older adults, content analysis.

<p><b>OBJECTIVE:</b> Investigating relationships among age, gender, educational level, and meanings of successful aging, perceived health and perceived social support according community-dwelling elderly.<br> <b>PARTICIPANTS:</b> Data were gathered from the data set of a survey about conditions of successful aging (n = 716; 70,2% women; mean age 72 ± 8,6). They answered two open questions about the meaning of successful aging, five scales about perceived social support, one scale about perceived health, and a socio-demographic questionnaire.<br> <b>RESULTS:</b> The themes derived from content analysis were: health and functional independence, psychological adjustment, positive social relationships, active engagement with life, orientation to the well-being of others, owning of material resources and belief on the impossibility of successful aging. Those aged 60 to 69 pointed more frequently to active engagement with life than those aged 80 did; those with less of eight years of education pointed more to health and functional independence than the most educated did. There were no differences due to gender concerning the meanings, with exception of psychological adjustment, where women scored higher than men. Positive social relationships were more frequent among participants with low and moderate scores in perceived social support. Mentions to psychological adjustment, spirituality and religion were more frequent among the participants with the highest scores of perceived health<br> <b>CONCLUSIONS:</b> Successful aging is a multidimensional construct which interacts with personal assessments about health and social support. Particular features of the sample may have affected the relative homogeneity observed in the results.</p>