Leisure Activities in Care Homes: How Do they Relate to the Well-Being of the Elderly?

We will present a study on the well-being of elderly people living in care homes in Germany. This is an important area of research for medicine, gerontology and developmental psychology but is not very often studied (Bradshaw et al., Age and Ageing 41:429–440, 2012). We developed a specific questionnaire for this population to study their well-being related to the theory of daily activities and existential experiences (Juchli,Pflege. Praxis und Theorie der Gesundheits- und Krankenpflege, 1997; Krohwinkel, Der Pflegeprozess am Beispiel von Apoplexiekranken, 1993). We asked N =160 elderly people as well as their relatives and their nurses about their well-being and their leisure activities. We will present the psychometric properties of the newly developed questionnaire (reliability, factor structure, external validity) and correlations between well-being and activity. The results indicate that leisure activities like taking part in memory training or social activities predict the well-being of the care home residents with small effects. We will discuss discrepancies between the three informant groups and consequences from our research for monitoring the well-being in residential care homes.