Research On The Relationship Between Social Support, Fear Of Falls And Depression In The Elderly

Depression can lower the elderly's quality of life and decrease the elderly's social adaption level, so it is an important psychological factor that endangers the elderly's mental health. The relation between social support and depression of the elderly had different conclusion. Being afraid to fall is "the reduction of self-efficiency or confidence so as to avoid falling in some activities",which is one of the common psychological problems of the elderly. Some researches have demonstrated that being afraid to fall has something to do with the depression of the elderly in community and nursing home. Based on the previous study, this research explores the relation between social support, being afraid to fall and depression of the elderly..This research adopts Geriatric Depression Scale 11 Questions Simplified Edition,Modified Falls Efficacy Scale and Social Support Rating Scale, and selects 300 senior people aged at 60 or above in Nanjing city, Jiangsu Province and in the rural areas of Henan Province. Through literature review, questionnaire survey, T-test, variance analysis,regression correlation analysis, etc. the paper comes to the following research conclusions:(1)The elderly's social support and depression state shows significant differences based on their living area, living conditions, economic conditions, pension state and disease conditions. The elderly's being afraid to fall shows significant differences in terms of their economic conditions and falling experiences.(2)The elderly's being afraid to fall is positively related to the depression; the socialsupport of the elderly is negatively related to the depression; the fear of falling and social support can predict the elderly's depression; the social support of the elderly has no relation with their being afraid to fall.(3)Pension state has prominent regulating effect on the fear of falling and thedepression. The elderly who have pension have less fear of falling and less depression.(4)Living area has significant regulating effect on the fear of falling and the depression.Compared with the elderly in city, there is a significant relation between the fear of falling and the depression for those lived in rural areas; they have lower level of their depression if they are less afraid to fall.Therefore, this research draws the conclusion: the mental health of the elderly can beaffected by the support level and psychological fear of falling they have. The more social support they have, the less depression they have. but if the elderly have low level fear of failing, they also can have low level of depression. For retirement elderly, the relationship between the afraid of falling and the level of depression is more obviously. The degree of this relationship depends on where the old people live ,urban or rural.