ارزیابی سلامت معنوی و عوامل مرتبط در سالمندان شهر کاشان

Introduction and purpose: Spiritual well-being is one of the main elements in human health which is influenced by a variety of factors. Spirituality plays an important role in identifying purpose of life, increasing life expectancy and improving quality of life. Thereby, this study aimed to investigate spiritual well-being and its associated factors among elderly living in the city of Kashan. Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 500 elderly (above 60 years old) who were utilizing the community health centers of Kashan, Iran in 2014. The participants were selected by multiple-stage cluster sampling method and the cluster sizes were different according to gender and living area. The demographic characteristics and spiritual well-being (SWB) measured via standardized questionnaire. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 13. Descriptive statistics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, spearman correlation coefficient, Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U test, Friedman test and multiple regressions were used to analyze the data. The significance level for all of the statistical tests were set at p<0.05. Findings: In the present study, 290 (58%) participants were male and mean age of the subjects was 72.07&plusmn;9.03 years. Majority of the participants (85.2%, N= 426 ) in this study reported moderate level of spiritual well-being while, only 74 (14.8%) of them reported high level. The most influence effect dimension in spiritual health relate to existential well-being (p=0.0001, Beta= 0.567). Our findings revealed significant relationships between spiritual well-being score and the following variables gender (p=0.0001), marital status (p=0.02), number of children (p=0.0001), income (p=0.012) and being employed at the time of study (P=0.05). Conclusion: The spiritual health of elderly was higher among male, married individual, having high level of existential well-being, being employed as well as having incoming. Therefore, empowering elderly with higher levels of existential well-being within the religious programs may produce better results.