Study On Differences In Urban And Rural Psychological Needs For The Elders

With the development of social economy and improvement in people’s living standard, the spiritual and cultural life and mental demand of old people are paid more and more attention, and present the development trend of diversification. Therefore, besides economic support and basic living care, we should also pay close attention to the old people’s spiritual comfort.This paper aims at exploring the connotation and status quo of psychological need between urban and rural old people. In the special urban and rural context, the study compares the old people’s psychological needs from specific dimensions so as to further maintain the mental health of old people and provide a reference to improve the old people’s successful aging and good adjustment.The research objects are the old people who are more than60years old from Changsha urban area and a village of Hengyang. The author edited a questionnaire entitled "old people psychological needs and health" and conduced a questionnaire survey among the research objects. Altogether301effective questionnaires are obtained, including147city samples and154rural samples. According to the survey data, using SPSS17.0, the paper processes the data analysis by descriptive statistics, single factor multivariate analysis, multiple regression analysis, Linear correlation etc..The results showed that the urban old people differ from the rural old people in different dimensions of psychological needs, for the urban old people communication need ranks the highest while for the rural old people family need is on the top. There exist differences in different levels of psychological need between the urban and rural old people among which communication need and value need have obvious differences, health need and family need exist significant differences in their groups, but there is not remarkable difference in respect need. Urban old people have higher need in communication and value than rural old people. Family need and health need are the most common requirements for the old people, but the rural old people based on "blood" and "geography" have stronger dependency upon family need. Social and economic factor, children and family, occupation, degree of education are the main influencing factor of old people’s psychological needs. The old people who have good economical condition, rich social leisure activities, relatively high cultural level and harmonious family have higher requirement in all aspects of psychological needs, and their degrees of satisfaction are relatively high. According to the research results, this study puts forward suggestions as a reference to the future research and professional mental health care service of old people.