A Study on the Effect of Social Relation Enhancement on the Life Satisfaction of Elderly Women Living Alone – Focused on the Participation of Elderly Employment Program

Background: Researcher who has interested in new social risk concentrated on live alone elderly women because they were easily fall into poverty and severed emotional support. Under this circumstance social work practitioners encourage to create intervention for prevent female aged person become as a member of risk group. This program expected that give more opportunity to increase social participation, income, enhancement of health care. According to this purpose, program evaluation of effectiveness through improvement of social relation enhancement and life satisfaction need to confirm its excellence. Although some researchers and practitioners have recognized the importance of relationship between social relation enhancement and life satisfaction, less attention has been paid to the participation of employment program for elderly. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to verify the impact of social relation enhancement on life satisfaction among female living alone who participated in senior employment program.

Method: For the research purpose, we used 2013 Nationwide Survey of Elderly Employment Program. This nationwide survey conducted by Korea Labor Force Development Institute for the aged. It started October 12 of 2012 and finished November 16 of 2012. The data used disproportionate sampling and self-administered survey questionnaire. 528 female workers who live alone were selected from final 2,005 cases. We used social relation enhancement as an independent variable, life satisfaction as a dependent variable, and age, income, residential type, achievement, religion, perceived health status as control variables. Multiple-regression analysis was used for analysis, with SPSS 17.0 software.

Result: Among the female elderly living alone who has been utilized in analysis, the age distribution was from 61 to 89 and over half of the group, which is 58.3%, were in their 70s. Also, the average household income was 6.765 million Korean won($6530.6) and 66.6% of the form of residence occupancy is self-owned. The level of education among subjects showed most of 42.6% of elementary school, no education (39.6%), middle to high school (14.9%), and college education (2.8%). The participation of religion among the female elderly living alone is rather dull and 71.3% of them are not currently participating. The relative health state showed that 45.3% of them believed themselves as healthy. The degree of social relations enhancement were in average of 3.3 and had highest awareness at little enhancement. As a result of multiple regression analysis, only the degree of social relations enhancement had statistically significant effect on life satisfaction (β=.164, P<.001).

Conclusions: The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect that enhancement in social relations among female elderly living alone who participate in elderly employment program has on their life satisfaction. As a result, the more female elderly living alone who participated in the program realize that their social relation enhancement degree has increased, the more they aware that their life satisfaction has improved. This study is significant in a way that not only it studied the participants of somewhat unsatisfactory employment program, but also further verified the current issue; factors that affects the quality of life of female elderly living alone.