An Empirical Research On Elderly Resilience

Resilience is described as a kind of positive mental quality that enables individuals to cope effectively with a stressful situation and protect their physical and mental health. It has been nearly forty years since identification of resilience in 70s-80s of 20th century, foreign researchers have made remarkable results in this field. While the research on resilience is just in its starting stage in China and little research has been done with elders. It's an urgent need to identify the strengths of the elderly in the context of Chinese cultural that might help them maintain a healthy outcome following exposure to adversity and rebound after a negative experience and adapt themselves to environment or promote the level of mental health.We invited 737 community elderly people of Nanchang area in Jiangxi province participated in this study through questionnaire which was used to develop a resilience questionnaire for the elderly and explore the characteristic of elderly resilience multi-angularly. In addition, with the help of Life Event Scale and Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale of Happiness (MUNSH), the relationships among resilience, life event stress and subjective well-being were conducted in this paper.The main findings are as follows:1. Resilience questionnaire for the elderly was consisted of 41 items, including eight factors like: solving problem ability, family awareness, self-adjustment, interpersonal association, friends support, self-efficacy, seeking support and the attitude of optimism and tolerance. The resilience questionnaire for the elderly had been proved to be fine validity and reliability through examination and is suitable to measure the resilience in health age people.2. The resilience of the elderly differed remarkably on many factors as age, level of educational attainment, income, marital status, religious belief, family atmosphere, self care, hobby and health appraisal.3. Resilience, life event stress and subjective well-being were closely related. Life event stress was in significant negative correlation with resilience; life event stress was in significant negative correlation with subjective well-being and resilience was in significant positive correlation with subjective well-being. 4. About l/5 elderly people who experienced severe stresses or adversities had been identified resilient people (high resilience), contracting with moderate resilient and low resilient individuals,they had highest level of subject well-being.5. Resilience had significant predictability on subjective well-being. The higher the level of resilience was, the higher the level of the subjective well-being was: Resilience was a mediator between negative life event stress and subjective well-being.