Effect of Household Type on Suicidal Ideation, Quality of Life, and Health-related Factors of the Elderly

Abstract

Mental health is an important factor for a successful aging process and has become a major policy issue around the world, especially in the field of health care. The number of living alone increases due to the characteristics of developmental stages such as children’s independence, bereavement, divorce, and the increase in life expectancy. With population aging and change in family structure, the senior suicide rate is rapidly increasing in Korea. Since suicidal ideation is an important risk factor for suicide attempts, multifaceted research is urgently needed to analyze the factors affecting suicidal ideation considering household type. This study was a descriptive study to develop the public health factors impacting senior suicide ideation by household type. This study used secondary data and raw data was extracted from 7th KNHANES(2017) of population-based information with approval from the KCDC and collected by the stratified colonies system extraction method. A total of 1,047 respondents over 65 years old was extracted, which was divided into two groups: one-person household and multi-person household. Demographic traits included sex, education level, income quartile, and having a job. Health-related factors included subjective health perception, smoking, drinking, excessive drinking, weekday sleep times, weekend sleep times, regular walking, muscle strength exercise, body mass index, uncomfortable chewing, breakfast frequency, lunch frequency, and dinner frequency, and dietary life. Quality of life scored on EuroQol-5 Dimension and suicidal ideation in the previous year was included. The complex sample analysis was utilized to analyze the data using SPSS 20.0 program. Complex samples chi-square tests were used to examine the difference in suicidal ideation by demographic characteristics in each household. Multiple logistic regression was performed to identify the association between the variables related to senior suicidal ideation. Results of the study showed that factors affecting suicidal ideation in one-person households were sex, frequency of excessive drinking, and discomfort. For the multi-person households, influential factors were the frequency of lunch and depression. This study was meaningful in identifying different factors that contributed to senior suicidal ideation according to household type.