Ageing Research and Geriatric Medicine

Biography

Hannah Evangeline Sangeetha is currently a teaching Facul­ty of Social work in the Department of Social work at Loyola College for the last 10 years and was previously a Social work Practitioner in the field of Medical and Psychiatry, Adoption, HIV/AIDS and Family and child welfare. She has completed her Doctoral Studies in Gerontology and submitted her research on the title “Active ageing and quality of life of rural elderly women” focusing on the quality of life of the most unprivileged elderly women in families living in rural Tamil Nadu. She has served as a Senior Peer Reviewer for the International Academic forum conference on Ageing and Gerontology-AGEN-2018 held at Kobe, Japan and also published articles in journals and books.

Abstract

Ageing is an inevitable change in the life span of an individual. India’s old age population has increased from 19 million in 1947 to 100 million in the 21st century. The United Nations World Population ageing reports that the grey population has immensely increased from 9.2% in 1990 to 11.7 % in 2013 and it is expected to triple by the year 2050 growing from 737 million to over 2 billion persons 60 years of age and older. Ageing is a period of physical, mental and social decline which brings a host of challenges to the individual and the family, Hence it requires attention at the micro, mezzo and the macro levels of the society. The concepts of healthy and successful aging are being used to help people to change their negative attitude towards aging. This perspective is important to make people realize their potentialities to bring about a change in the minds of senior citizens as well as the society. The objective of this study was to understand the level of active ageing among the rural elderly women and its impact on the quality of life. 330 elderly women from 12 villages of Sriperumbudur associated with the Mobile medical care of Help age India were interviewed using census method. The study revealed the following findings; most respondents in this study were young old between the age group of 60 to 75 years. All the three major religious groups were represented, 85.5percent were Hindus. Majority of the respondents 73.3percent had no education. It was interesting to know that majority of the respondents were self-reliant (83.94 percent) and 82.73 percent of them very independent and took care of them by themselves (activities of daily living) without any support from their families. 76.9 percent of the senior women worked based on their competencies, 75.5 percent of them were involved in plenty of activities everyday including their occupation and household chores, which enabled them to be physically active. The chi square values that there is a significant association between the overall active ageing score, religion and number of members in the family. The other demographic variables like age, occupation, income marital status, age at marriage, number of children in the family and Socio-Economic Status were not significantly associated with the overall active aging score. The p-value 0.032 showed Social network and being self-reliant are significantly associated. The study surprisingly shows that most women enjoyed freedom and Independence in their family which is a positive indicator of active ageing.