Abstract

The purpose of this study was to find out the important social psychological factors of successful aging in Korean elderly. We assumed in this paper that two cardinal criteria of the successful aging would be both of physical health and subjective well-being. The main hypotheses of this study was that the important 12 social psychological factors would contributed to discriminate among the successful aging elderly from both of the average and the unsuccessful aging elderly. We collected the survey data from 1,826 elderly(mean age of 72.41 years old) through face to face interview in Seoul and Chun-cheon regional areas in Korea. The results of the discriminant analysis showed that 11 social psychological variables except the religious attitude contributed to discriminate among the successful aging elderly, average group and the unsuccessful aging elderly. The successful aging elderly were higher level of economic status, marital satisfaction, satisfaction with the offsprings, social support, fulfillment of social and self-esteem need, exercise, drinking alcohol and positive emotional experience in everyday life, but lower level of past illness, expectation of support from the offsprings and negetive emotional experience in everyday life. The result also revealed that at least 83.6% percentage of the exact classification hit to discriminate among the successful elderly, the average elderly and the unsuccessful aging elderly. The conceptional assumption about successful aging and the results of this study were discussed in terms of the previous studies performed in Korea and abroad and the suggestions for further study were also proposed.