東北稲作地域における福祉サポート資源と高齢者対策の課題

──地域社会の役割に着目して──

抄録

　　　In the rice-producing area in Tohoku where family size is shrinking and the population is ageing, it is necessary to set out measures that clearly state the role of local community in supporting self-reliance of rural seniors at home. This paper regards economic, instrumental and emotional supporters to be “welfare support resources” and identifies such support resources for rural seniors based on a survey conducted among seniors in Daisen, Akita in order to examine roles of local communities and challenges in addressing senior needs. As a result of analyzing the situation, the following three points became clear.
　　　First, rice production is an important source of income for seniors but senior families who don’t live with their children lack a supplemental workforce. The conventional collective management of farm roads and waterways provides indirect support to agricultural activities by seniors. However, the primary workforce for the collective work comes from middle-aged members of the community. Thus it is necessary to introduce measures to reduce the burden on middle-aged members and ensure reciprocity between middle-aged members and other generations. Secondly, local communities are expected to provide relatively light support in terms of burden or heavy but less time-consuming support when they provide instrumental or emotional support. In order to pursue this support, local communities need to watch seniors on a routine basis while sorting necessary tasks for their residential lives and develop a system of support that is appropriate to the realities of seniors and local communities in partnership with related organizations. Thirdly, the availability of instrumental and emotional support sources differs depending on the attributes of the seniors, thus measures to support seniors need to be developed by taking their attributes into consideration.