Purpose: The purpose of this research was to investigate the determinants of morale among elderly in rural area of Taiwan. We examine the psychometric properties of the Philadelphia Geriatric Morale Scale (PGMS) in a rural geriatric society in Taiwan.
Methods : This research consisted 713 participants aged 60 years and older living in the community who belonged to local geriatric society in June to October of 2006. The 22-item PGMS was administered.
Results The results identified morale do correlate with some underlying factors, including education status of elderly and family, occupation of retired before and after, salary before retired, self-perceived health, activities of daily living, living with family or not, self-perceived piety of children ,achievements of children and anxiety about career and marriage of children and financial concern . After logistic regression
analyses, we found that the important factors that influence morale of elderly were:
education status of elderly, self-perceived health, self-perceived piety of children ,achievements of children and anxiety about career and marriage of children and financial concern.
Conclusion : Compared with the other study, this one showed that elderly in Taiwan had low morale.
Therefore, we suggested government should set health promotion into action and help elderly to obtain employment It is imperative that government should develop community care network and make effort to change differences between urban and rural area. It is very crucial to fulfill the ideas of self-realization to the elderly.
