| Summary: | 碩士 === 中國醫藥大學 === 護理學研究所 === 92 === The purposes of this study were to explore the relationships among depression, social support, and loneliness and the predictors of depression and loneliness of the elderly living in long-term care facilities. A correlational research design and convenience sampling were used to recruit 100 elders who met the sampling criteria from 7 long-term care facilities located in the Taichung county and the Taichung city. The measurement instruments included Geriatric Depression Scale Short Form, Social Support Scale, and Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale. Data were analyzed by using SPSS/PC 10.0 for Windows. The statistics used for data analysis included frequency distribution, arithmetic mean, mode, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman rank-order correlation, logistic regression, and stepwise multiple regression.
The results indicated that there were significant differences in depression between different groups of having chronic illness or not and among different groups of institutionalized reasons. There were significant differences in general social support between different groups of gender, marital status, having religious believes or not, having children or not, living arrangement before institutionalization, institutionalized reasons, and the fee payers. In addition, there were significant differences in loneliness between different groups of having religion believes or not and previous occupational status. Depression was negatively correlated with loneliness. Besides, the results of Spearman rank-order correlation analysis showed that relatives’ support, friends’ support, and satisfaction of support were all negatively correlated with depression. Loneliness was negatively correlated with general social support, children’s support, relatives’ support, friends’ support, residents’ support, emotional support, social integration, informational support, tangible support, and social support satisfaction. Logistic regression showed that loneliness and having chronic diseases were the major predictors of depression. Stepwise multiple regression showed that depression, residents’ support, and children’s support explained 48.5% of the variance in loneliness.
The results of this study may provide as references for long-term care facility personnel. Finally, implications for clinical practice and future research are offered.
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