A Hope Intervention Compared to Friendly Visitors as a Technique to Reduce Depression among Older Nursing Home Residents

Donna M. Wilson, Alexandra Marin, Param Bhardwaj, Bonnie Lichlyter, Amy Thurston and Deepthi Mohankumar

Nursing Research and Practice, 2010, vol. 2010, 1-6

Abstract:

Depression is common among older persons. An experimental study was undertaken to test the impact of a four-week hope program on depressed nursing home residents. Residents aged 65 or older, who met the criteria for this pilot study and agreed to participate, were randomly assigned to (a) an intervention group, and provided with weekday hope interventions mainly involving positive messages and pictures or (b) a modified control group, and provided with a friendly weekday greeting. The structured hope intervention was not proven effective for reducing depression or raising hope. Instead, a significant reduction in depression among the control subjects was found, as well as a nonsignificant increase in their level of hope. Although these findings suggest friendly visitors may be a more efficacious nonpharmacological approach for reducing depression, further investigations are needed to confirm this and to explore the impact of other hope interventions.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/NRP/2010/676351.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/NRP/2010/676351.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnlnrp:676351

DOI: 10.1155/2010/676351

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Nursing Research and Practice from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().