A Study on the Psychological Abuse against the Elderly, Case of Elderly Visiting Omid Cultural Center, City of Tehran

Intergenerational relationships between elderly parents and their children, the most important issue of family support networks, has been generally considered as the main source to improve the quality of life and satisfaction of the elderly particularly in traditional societies. This kind of family relationships previously was captured by a sort of intergenerational commitments, while today it brings in mind a help or support that flows just from children to their elderly parents and thus it can be potentially a source to abuse the elderly. This study aimed to investigate the causes of this type of the elderly abuse in a sample of 300 elderly visiting Cultural Center of Omid in Tehran. Psychological abuse has been measured with 9 items using confirmatory factor analysis and internal consistency. The results show that more than 62 percent of the elderly in the study have experienced at least one form of psychological abuse. Logistic regression analysis showed the importance of two contextual determinants including sex, and role of the elderly in their family household, and two extrinsic determinants including dependency of the elderly to others in doing daily activities and in affording their costs of living. According to the results, variations from financial independence to dependence, and from independence in carrying out daily activities to any lower level of independence and to complete dependency among the elderly, tend more likely to increase the risk of psychological abuse by other members of their family. However, there was no significant bivariate correlation between sex and experience of psychological abuse, adding it to the variables in the equation not only improved the effectiveness of underlying variables of dependency but also led to appear a significant relationship between sex and being exposed to psychological abuse. As a result, in the equal socioeconomic conditions, it is possible even to reduce the risk of psychological abuse among the elderly women compared with the elderly men.