2020 Volume 30 Issue 3 Pages 123-131
This study was to clarify how the program in which elderly people donated food at local events to high school students was affected by mental and physical health, images of the elderly, frequency of meeting the elderly and their interest in the local event foods of the high school students.
The participants were 80 high school students who attended a senior high school in Hyogo Prefecture. They were divided into the experimental group of 24 people who took part in the cooking program and the control group of 56 people who did not take part in the cooking program. The experimental group of high school students took part in the cooking program twice and they worked with the elderly in each program. Questionnaire surveys were conducted with the experimental group and the control group before and after the cooking programs.
The questionnaire included the following items: unidentified complaints, self-rated health, images of the elderly (Semantic Differential Scale: SD), considered age of the elderly, frequency of meeting the elderly people and their interest in local event foods.
Variations in each item of the questionnaire surveys before and after the cooking programs were compared between the experimental group and the control group using a two-way repeated measures analysis of variance.
The results showed that the scores of the images of the elderly such as "warm-hearted”, "right”, "easy to talk to”, "fast”, "big”, "kind”, "gentle” and "reliable” significantly increased in the experimental group.
After the cooking programs in which the elderly people donated food at local events to the high school students, the high school students’ mental and physical health was not significantly improved, but the program improved their images of the elderly people. It is suggested that the intergenerational cooking program in which local event foods are donated to the younger generation improves the high school students’ images of elderly people even if it takes place over a short period of time.
