engleski

Textual Analysis in Elderly People

Elderly people are a specific population not only because of their needs but because of their way of thinking and their attitude towards themselves and their surrounding. The aim of this study is to show how ageing changes their way of thinking and their attitude. The study includes 34 elderly living in the rural part near Zagreb. They were interviewed twice ; in 1993 and in 1996. At the time of the first interview all of them were 80 years and older. Both interviews included the same 4 questions: 1. their communication with the family, 2. their activities in the family and outside their homes, 3. their hobbies, 4. their attitude towards life in general and situations concerning themselves. All the answers were recorded in a form of a free text. The standardised open-ended interview was chosen because it is rich in information (1). The answers were not coded or modified in order not to loose useful data and certain characteristics in the vocabulary on the whole and / or in the vocabulary of some groups characterised by one or more qualitative and / or quantitative variables. SPAD.T program, a special program for the statistical analyses of textual data (2), was used. This program enables lexicometric analyses and multidimensional statistical analyses of free text such as correspondence analysis and clustering methods (3). The results showed that elderly people change even in such a short period of time. They become more occupied with their inner life. The words connected with God or death were 4 to 6 times more frequent in the second interview. Some words found in the first interview disappeared or their number was reduced in the second one such as words related to the church or health. The influence of the mass media, especially TV, could also be seen in the elderly. The use of the word war was particularly interesting. Changes of the vocabulary caused by personal reasons such as illness, stress, ageing or by other events in the outside world, mass media etc. show the advantages and usefulness of informal conversation and standardised open-ended interviews which, in our opinion, should be used more often. Besides, it is necessary to use longitudinal studies so as to find out changes that occur as time passes.

textual analysis; elderly people; epidemiology

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