A social work study on the effect of gender on mental ability and depression among institutionalized elderly versus nursing home residents

摘要

This paper studies the level of depression and mental ability among elderly people who live in institutional elderly versus nursing home residents. The investigation designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 345 elderly people who are residences of both places. The study implements Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS) test where mental ability includes seven factors including “general information”, “orientation”, “mind control”, “logical memory” and “repeated figures”, “visual memory” and “learn association”. The study performs some statistical tests and the results show that gender has no impact on two groups of elderly people in terms of mental utilization as well as depression level when the level of significance is five percent.