OSTEOARTHRITIS AMONG ELDERLY FEMALE RESIDENTS IN LIFE CARE COMMUNITIES: THEIR COPING STRATEGIES AND HEALTH STATUS.
Contributors: Catholic University of America.
Published: 1987
Number of pages: 192
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: With increasing age, many elderly women experience multiple losses such as, a decline in physical health, an inability to maintain a private home, and a loss of social roles. For those women who live beyond 75 years of age there are added stresses. Physical health declines as the aging process results in a loss of physical vigor and in an increased susceptibility to disease. The primary cause of disability in the elderly is osteoarthritis. How elderly women cope with the pain and physical impairment caused by osteoarthritis is not well understood.

Coping strategies are used by individuals in an attempt to master, control, or reduce stress. Individual coping is facilitated by the availability of personal and social resources. Residence in a life care community is considered a supportive social resource for the elderly women in this study. The purpose of the study was to describe how elderly female residents of life care communities cope with the pain and physical impairment of osteoarthritis and to describe the relationship between coping strategies and health status.

Data were collected from 130 female subjects with osteoarthritis who were 75 years or older and resided in five life care communities. Each subject completed three assessment tools designed to measure coping strategies, subjective health status, and objective physical impairment. The average age of the sample was 83.2 years.

Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the relationship of health status to major study variables. Predictor variables accounted for 49 percent of the variance in physical health: age and education (15 percent), physical impairment (29 percent), pain (2 percent), and the coping strategy, escape avoidance (3 percent). In a second multiple regression analysis of the criterion variable psychological health the only significant predictor variable was the coping strategy, escape avoidance; accounting for 16 percent of the variance.

The study concluded: first, that the subjects use multiple and varied coping strategies to deal with stress and second, that an avoidance type of coping strategy may not be detrimental to certain elderly women.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-03, Section: B, page: 0702.

Thesis (D.N.SC.)--THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, 1987.

School code: 0043.