This study presents “what sexuality is for the elderly,” and “how these, sexual relationship and spousal emotional closeness affect the life-satisfaction of the elderly.”
To research this, I made a questionnaire and handed out to 309 people who are over 65 years old, using senior welfare center, and started conducting an analysis as follows. First, the general characteristic of the subjects is
presented as a frequency and percentage. The correlation among standards was analyzed by “Pearson’s correlation coefficient,” and the effect of each standard on life-satisfaction was conducted with using “Multi-Regression
Analysis.” The results confirmed by the analysis above can be summarized as follows. Firstly, in general, it was expressed that the most subjects agreed the importance in sexual relationship. In this case, the result differed by gender, educational background, and health status; males, people educated more than high school and people in fine health status said “Yes.” The factors that showed difference of the satisfaction of sexual life are gender, region and health status; the satisfaction of sex life of male gender living in city areas relevantly depends upon their fine health status. Furthermore, people having high satisfaction level in sexual life also showed high life-satisfaction level. As to the emotional closeness of the elderly spouses, the importance of sex life is in proportion to the emotional closeness, and the closer the spousal
emotional relationship, the higher the life-satisfaction. Life- satisfaction is very much dependant upon the condition whether the elderly has religions like Protestantism and Buddhism, and whether they live in more than medium and
small sized city, and upon the income level. If so, on the premise of this, this study propose that we should find the
way(s) to solve this problem at individual, local, and national levels in the connection that what we can do for solving the problem of sex life of the elderly.
In the first place, in individual aspect, an aging society is a destiny which we cannot avoid, especially the elderly sex already became one of the important social problems. And on the premise that it requires the social reflections on
the bias against the elderly and the negative recognition of
POST-SEXUALITY (that they are not related to the sexuality(or sex life)), the right to persue both physical and emotional pleasures is not related with age, therefore the elderly should try to get the self-determination for social
structure which suppresses their sexual needs and sexual relationships as the problem of the elderly''s sex has become an open discussion of the public interest.
First of all, it is required that they themselves should try their social and economic activities with confidence in a positive attitude so as to live the rest of their normal, dignified lives. Looking on the social aspect, at the social education level, they are provided with the rational and realistic knowledge and information of sexuality,
so as to help them get out of the ignorance and prejudice about the sexuality. And it is important that we should inculcate them with positive perception of sexuality, so, this report propose that civic organizations and social educational institutions should affirmatively help them with policy support. Especially as to the national level, this report propose that a sex education institute for elderly should be established at national level like SIECUS(Sex
Informaion and Education Council of the United States) in USA. And this proposes One Stop Service which problem solver(s) can hear and solve various problems as well as the sex problem related with the elderly in one place at the same time. Finally, recently, social welfare, gerontology, sociology, nursing science and the other fields of sciences are respectively dealing with the elderly''s life-satisfaction related with their sex life, which emphasizes some integrated approaches through the exchanges with various fields of scholarship.