Resilience and Life Satisfaction among Community and Institutionalized Older Persons

Resilience in older persons enhances the sense of self-efficacy and plays a pivotal role in enhancing their quality of life. It equips them better to deal with adversities of the advancing age, and also improves the sense of wellbeing and satisfaction with life. It has been seen that older people with good social support are better in coping with the demands of day to day affairs. On the contrary, poor social support such as impoverished relation among family members adversely affects mental health which worsens with advancing age. Older persons living in institutionalized setups are thus at risk for developing mental health issues as they lack essential support. There is dearth of studies exploring resilience and satisfaction with life among older persons living in institutionalized setups in India. Thus, present study is aimed at comparing life satisfaction and resilience between older persons living in community and institutionalized setups. It further explored the relationship between resilience and life satisfaction in both the groups. Sixty-five institutionalized older persons were compared with equal number of community based matched controls on measures of life satisfaction (Satisfaction with Life Scale; SLS), cognitive functions (Mini Mental Status Examination; MMSE) and resilience (Cannor-Davidson Resilience Scale; CD-RISC). Life satisfaction was significantly more in community based older persons (20.55±5.62) than the participants living in institutionalized set-up (15.88±4.97, t-ratio=5.54). Community participants (50.13±7.76, t-ratio=2.29) also had significantly higher resilience level than the institution based (46.52±8.12) older persons. Correlation between life satisfaction and resilience was found to be insignificant for both community older adults (r= .0.32, p=.802) and their institutionalized counterpart (r=.104, p=.408). Persons living in institutional setups exhibit poor sense of satisfaction with their lives and are also less resilient than their community-based counterpart. Findings have implication for successful aging and mental health needs for older persons living in community.