Adjustment to the Life in Retirement Community

1990 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 63450031
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: 社会学(含社会福祉関係)
• Research Institution: Tokai University
• Principal Investigator: MATSUMURA Takao Tokai University, Communications, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (10107526)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): KOYANO Wataru Saint Andrew University, Sociology, Associate Professor, 社会学部, 助教授 (30162077)
• Project Period (FY): 1988 – 1990
• Keywords: Retirement Community / Life Satisfaction Indes / Relation with the Family / Relation with Friends / Conjugal Family System vs Stem Fammily System / Multidimensionality of Subjectivity of Activities of the Old

Research Abstract

Frequencies of activities, specially those of psychologically significant activities, have been reported relevant to the well-being of the elderly as far. In our research carried out on elderly inhabitants in retirement communities, however, two kinds of activities, i, e., relations with friends and those with family, showed different results as for their well-being, though both were acknowledged significant for their adjustment to the life in retirement communities. In one hand, frequent communications with friends both inside and outside of the retirement communities were proved contributable to the well-being of the elderly calculated through the revised edition of Neugarten life satisfaction index adjusted to be usable for japanese elderly (LSIK). On the other hand, relations with family were not significantly related.
This result could be understood in two ways. First, psychological significance might not be equal for all the activities of the elderly in the sense that some are con tributable only when they are activated frequently by the elderly and the others are so even thought not activated. And the latter type of activities might often be regarded by the elderly most significant among others or be of qualitatively different from the first type of activated. We would like to suggest that relations with the friends may be of the first type and those with the family may be of the second.
Secondly, inhabitants in retirement communities communicate with family basing on the conjugal family system rather than the stem family system that required the family members to have frequent contact with one another. As these elderly living in the retirement communities are totally independent both economically and physically on their children, they are free from the requirements the old social system and are not expected to communicate so frequently with them, which have resulted in the new phenomenon that they seek primarily significant others in their neighbors. If this be true, the modern pattern of family relationship of the conjugal family system may have been appearing in Japan which was dominated to long by the stem family system.