خلاصه ماشینی:
Discussion: Social participation can be of effective factors on which policy makers and therapists can plan to improve the mental health of aged people .
Keywords: Older adults, Social participation, mental health Submitted: 2 January 2014 Accepted: 28 February 2014 Introduction Within a society in which being young and happy are so appreciated that elders hardly can appear at the scene, however, aged people are being treated, obviously, different from the past (1).
The present study aimed to examine the relation between social participation and mental health among an Iranian population.
This variance in results might have several reasons: researchers might use different instruments to measure either participation (almost in studies, a researcher-design or a checklist indicating some categories of getting involved in social or group activities were used) or health; they might distinguish between subjective and objective involvement, as some criticized subjective and non-physical engagement being included in the definition of social participation (25), while others paid attention to very details of engagement in any activity to measure this variable (26); they might take different ethnicity, sex or age limit into consideration.
In the present study, we sought to determine whether social engagement of elderly people has any relation to their mental health status.
In general, the study reveals that social participation should be taken into account as an important contributor of mental health among aged people.
The present study was conducted to examine the relationship between social participation and mental health among elderly in Hamadan city.