Structural Modeling of Social Health, Psycho-Physical Health, and Body Image Evaluation With the Mediating Role of Spiritual Health and the Quality of Life of the Elderly

The current paper aimed at “Designing a model of social health psycho-physical health and body image evaluation with the mediating role of spiritual health the quality of life (QoL) of the elderly by a structural modeling approach.”

 This is an applied retrospective, fundamental, descriptive paper emphasizing structural equations. The statistical population consists of one million elderly people aged 60 to 70 years living in Tehran out of eight million two hundred and thirty-one elderly people living in Iran. The statistical sample included 270 elderly people in Tehran selected in two stages, clustering for selecting parks in 22 districts of Tehran and purposive convenient sampling method (Fidel Tabaking formula). The research tools included the Ware & Sherbourne physical-mental health questionnaire, Ghodosi body image evaluation questionnaire, Keyes social well-being scale, paloutzian and ellison spiritual well being scale (SWBS), and WHO QoL in the elderly questionnaire. Statistical methods Amos and SPSS v. 22 software were used for descriptive statistics and structural modeling with path analysis technique and confirmatory factor analysis

 The findings showed that The study showed that there was a strong significant positive relationship between the variables QoL and physical-mental health  (β=0.084, P<0.01), spiritual well-being (β=0.0847, P<0.01), There was significant positive relationship between the variables spiritual well-being with social well-being (β=0.103, P<0.01), body image valuation (β=0.074, P<0.01), and physical-mental health. Moreover, there was a solid significant P<0.01 positive relationship between the predictor variables (physical-mental well-being, body image valuation, and social well-being) (0.694 to 0.764). 

 Physical-mental well-being, physical image evaluation, social well-being, and spiritual well-being variables increase, and improve the QoL of the elderly.