THE ADAPTATION OF ELDERLY DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

The purposes of this research were to contrastive study in adaptation's methods of the elderly during a COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand and foreign countries and to study problems and obstacles of the elderly in self adaptation during a pandemic in Thailand. This study used the mixed method research. By quantitative research, data was collected by a questionnaires and analyzed by Logistic Regression Analysis to explain the relations between the elderly's adaptation and the personal factors. For qualitative research, a documentary research was applied for understanding of policies and measure implemented in foreign countries about the elderly's adaptation. As for interviewing, 5 elders were interviewed to see their adaptation thereof.
The findings are that 99 percent of the elderly were informed about COVID-19 through television. This might be confirmation that the appropriate way to get information about the pandemic to elderly people would be via television. Moreover, the study found the association between age, educational level, and effects from the measure and the elderly's adaptation. The qualitative research from documentary reviews found that the elderly's adaptation in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand was different depending on contexts of society, culture, politics, economy, and technology. Every country brought technology to be used as a transmission media in order to reduce interpersonal contact, viral transmission, and outing activities and imposed the policy of economic remedial assistance to indemnify against the loss of income and health cares in order to control the epidemic. For the elderly cluster in Thailand, according to the interviews, found that they confronted troubles of employment and loss income which would like the government to help with the employment and money subsidy.