The Study On Quality Of Life Assessment Index System For The Urban Elderly Living At Home

With the increase of the aging and the social development, the study on the quality of life for the elderly becomes one of the hot topics nowadays. The bulk of the elderly desires to remain in home because of the level of economic development, the social security and the traditional concepts of piety in oriental cultures. Therefore, the urban elderly living at home is an important part of the elderly, and both the quantity and the proportion of the urban elderly living at home are rapidly growing. In order to know well the status of life about the urban elderly living at home, reflect the relation of factors about the quality of life, improve the quality of life for the urban elderly living at home, it is necessary to construct the quality of life assessment index system for them.The quality of life for the elderly is a comprehensive and complicated issue, and it is full of challenge to investigate how to quantitate the quality of life for the elderly. This dissertation is devoted to the study of quality of life for the elderly living at home. Starting with the definition and the characteristics of the urban elderly living at home with different cultural background, using the theoretical conception of the research and principles of index design and the experiences of various standardized assessment scales, which have both reliability and validity for reference, we establishes the quality of life assessment index system for the urban elderly living at home in the present dissertation. This index system can be used widely to quantitate, describe and analyze the life status of the urban elderly living at home, to provide the plentiful data to make the policy of improve and develop the quality of life for them, to make the government, community, enterprise and family pay more attention, to promote the construction of social community care and mutual aid networks, strengthen the function of family support, and develop social security and health care security system.The main content of research of the dissertation are the following:1). To make a thorough account of the relative theories on quality of life and quality of life of the elderly, to analyze the features of the index system about the life quality for the elderly, and to give a brief introduction of research objective, momentous current significance and plan.2). To establish the theoretical model to analyze the quality of life for urban elderly living at home, and to give an introduction on the theory of aging.3). To analyze profoundly how to quantitate the assessment factors of quality life of the urban elderly living at home. These factors include the income and consumption, the living condition and family facilities, the health status (physical and mental health), the social support network and the leisure life.4). To put forward the principles about proper assessment and establish the assessment index system of quality of life for the urban elderly living at home. This index system includes both objective indexes and subjective indexes.5). Based on the investigation of Shanghai elderly in 2003, to measure and evaluate the quality of the urban elderly living at home as a whole, and to obtain a comparative study on quality of life for the urban elderly living at home by different demography and economic social characteristics.6). To combine the method of traditional comprehensive assessment with the multivariate statistic analysis, apply the graded and weighted method of point rating to assess the quality of life for urban elderly living at home.7). To sum up the main points of the dissertation, discuss the key problems about the quality of life for the urban elder in the future, and give several brief suggestions on how to improve the quality of life of the urban elderly living at home.