Teaching resourcefulness skills to older adults

With rapidly increasing numbers of elders in the United States, there is a growing need for interventions to promote independence and productive, healthy lifestyles among the elderly. Highly resourceful persons have been found to function better in their daily activities than those who lack resourcefulness skills. These skills, including self-controlling techniques and problem-solving, are believed to be learned and therefore can be taught. This pilot study examined the effects of teaching resourcefulness skills to healthy elders on measures of learned resourcefulness, anxiety, depression, adaptive functioning, and life satisfaction using a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test design. The intervention group consisted of 20 elders and the placebo group had 17 elders. Those elders who received the 6-week small group intervention that taught the skills constituting resourcefulness scored significantly higher on post-test measures of learned resourcefulness, adaptive functioning, and life satisfaction. Although significant negative correlations were found between resourcefulness scores and scores on measures of anxiety and depression, there were no significant differences in anxiety and depression between the intervention and placebo groups on the post-test measures. The findings suggest that learned resourcefulness training (LRT) is an important nursing intervention for promoting healthy, independent, and productive lifestyles among older adults.