Harolhanam Mohamed Wahid, Rahmah Mohd Amin
ABSTRACT
Quality of life is an individual perception regarding their life status in the contact of their local cultural and value system with regard to their vision. Quality of life has two main domain components. They are physical and mental component. A cross-sectional study was carried out to examine factors influencing the quality of life among the elderly between 60 years old and above. A number of 115 respondents were recruited from all seven health clinics in the district using universal sampling. The factors studied were socio-demographic characteristics, perception towards family’s social support, perception towards friend’s social support, present and absence of depression and satisfaction towards elderly health services. Descriptive analysis, t-test, correlation and linear regression were used to analyze the data. With regards to physical component of quality of life, age, gender, education and income were found to have significant difference whilst only race showed a significant difference toward mental component. Correlation analysis showed a significant association between perception towards family’s social support, perception towards friend’s social support, and depression with physical component of quality of life. However only depression showed a significant correlation with mental component of quality of life. On further analysis using linear regression it was found that only depression gave significant value (p<0.05), and this factor contributed only 13.2 percent of the variables in physical component and 35.6 percent of the variables in mental component. As the conclusion , findings from this study suggested that mental health status of the older person being studied does contribute to their quality of life. This is further challenged with poor perception of family as well as friend social support. Hence all health staff need to be aware of the multifactor associated with quality of life among elderly.
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