Perceived Family Support and Quality of Life of Elderly Population

Ageing is an unavoidable and irreversible change as a result of demographic transition in all societies. Family support for the elderly has become a very important issue in examining their overall well-being. Perceived Family Support is playing a key role in determining the Quality of Life of aged people.

The main aim of the research is to study the Perceived Family Support and Quality of Life of elderly people.

A co relational descriptive design with quantitative and qualitative approach was followed to obtain error free results. Two hundred thirteen elderly people were consecutively recruited from the randomly selected seing.

The average age of the study subjects was 68 years with 64.8% of them being females and 52.6% of them were living on their own. Most (61.5%) of them have no formal education, 78.9% were financially dependent on their family members for their basic needs and 81.7% live in joint family seing. Nearly two third (68.5%) of subjects were diagnosed with chronic illnesses for which they were taking treatment, The majority (82.6%) of perform their daily activities independently, 70% of get support from their family members and 45.1% felt only health as their major problem. The total obtained mean score for Perceived Family Support was 2.81 and for Quality of Life were 2.71. The Quality of Life of elderly people were positively (r = 0.58) correlated with their Perceived Family Support. The presence of Perceived Family Support 0.4 times increases the Quality of Life of elderly people.

This study found that the higher the family support the beer the Quality of Life. High levels of family support may represent a protective factor in increasing the Quality of Life of elderly people. To promote Quality of Life of the elderly, Governmental and nongovernmental organizations should establish activities that enhance elderly people self-esteem and promote good family relationship.