The Study on Education Program for Rural Elderly

농촌 노인의 생활영역별 교육프로그램 개발 연구

The proportion of the elderly in rural area(21.7％) is four times more than that of the urban area (5.4％) in Korea. With this rapid aging of the population in rural Korea there has been growing concern about the quality of life of rural elderly. Compare to urban elderly, rural elderly experience many disadvantages, especially in terms of limited offering of social/educational programs. Their social/educational needs are rarely assessed and there are few programs geared to the needs of rural elderly. In this regard, this study aims (1) to identify education and activity program needs of the rural elderly related to three dimensions: Family life, Farming life, and Community activities and (2) to develop education and activity programs for the rural elderly based on the needs assessment. For this purpose, data are gathered from 413 rural elderly and 110 community welfare specialists, using a structured questionaire. The statistical methods used for data analysis are descriptive statistics, cross tables with SPSS wins 10.0 program. The major findings of this study are as follows: Majority(94.1％) of the rural elderly wants to participate in diverse social/educational programs. They want to have programs dealing with 'relationship enhancement with children', 'nutrition', 'health and care', 'farming skill', 'gardening', 'volunteering', etc. Based on these results, we develop eight types of education program and four types of activity program, according to the priority of their needs in each dimension. There are four sessions of Family life program, and four sessions of Community activities program. The effect of these programs will be evaluated by taking pretest and protest in local basis.