Abstract
The aim of this research is to sort elderly living alone by their types of marital status and to clarify the relationships between those types and their higher-level functional capacity and mental health. The object of this research are 757 elderly people living alone chosen from 5,052 people who replied a mail survey that carried out on 7,707 people, out of 8,332 people over 65 years old in 2013 in the A ward B area of Tokyo, who are not nursing care level 4 or 5 and are not inmates of welfare facilities. This research adopted TMIG-IC as the index of higher-level functional capacity, and WHO-5-J as the mental health index. This research examined the relationships between the score of TMIG-IC and WHO-5-J and the types of living alone by general linear model. Its fixed factors are the types of their marital status（separation, dibosu, bereavement and unmarried）, annual income, whether they have separated children or not. And the covariate are their sex and age. The results are as follows. Though the relationship between the types of living alone and TMIG-IC score was not significant, WHO-5-J score was lower in parting group compared with bereavement group. In addition, there was an interaction between existence of separated children and the types of living alone. That is, separation group with separated children showed significantly low score.
