The Effectiveness of Structured Reminiscing on General Well-Being of Elderly Women in Yazd

Aging is a natural phenomenon in the path of human evolution. The elderly face many challenges at this stage. Anxiety, depression, and grief over the loss of loved ones can affect the general well-being of an elderly person. Structured reminiscence therapy is one of the therapeutic methods used to improve mental health and general well-being of the elderly. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of the effectiveness of structured reminiscing on the dimensions of general well-being of elderly women in Yazd.

The quasi-experimental research method was a pretest-posttest type with a control group, and the statistical population included all the elderly women in Yazd city in 1402. Among them, 46 people were selected by purposeful sampling and assigned to two experimental and control groups. The tool used in this research was general well-being questionnaire of Harold G. and Dapoy. Structured reminiscing was conducted on the experimental group during 8 sessions of 60 minutes, and the control group did not receive any intervention. The results were analyzed using statistical software Spss25 and Manova test.

The results showed that structured reminiscing had an effect on the dimensions of general well-being, including anxiety, depression, positive well-being, feeling of self-control, and general health. Regarding the feeling of vitality dimension, the training could not be effective and there was no improvement in this dimension.

Therefore, structured reminiscence is used as an intervention to improve the dimensions of general well-being of the elderly women, and mental health of the elderly.