Abstract
The aim of this study was to clarify the structural characteristics of the concept of health held by elderly people. The items of the survey were sex, age, educational background, and concept of health. For the concept of health, 15 items of physical, mental and social health were surveyed. The subjects were selected from 2,200 elderly people (over 65 years old), living at home, in five districts of Hokkaido, by the stratified random sampling method, confirmatory factor analysis by the maximum likelihood method was performed on the data of valid questionnaires recovered from 1,536 people. The results showed that the concept of health held by elderly people is composed of three factors : physical, mental and social health. The internal conformity of these factors was 0.83 for the physical health factor, and 0.71 for the mental health factor. The results of this study suggest that elderly people have the same concept of health as that advocated by WHO.
