The purpose of this study is to clarify risk factors of abuse from features of elders and caregivers. We carried out surveys by directly interviewing frail elderly persons of 60 years old and over living in a farm community "A" in a suburb of a large city. Fourteen of 78 frail elders were considered having abuse risk. 57.1% of females having abuse risk were the highly aged. The most frequent forms of abuse were emotional and psychological ones, and refusal and neglect of care came next. Many of them were given in combination form. As to relationship of caregivers, number of daughters-in-law were 27 (50%) with a highest percentage, and an abuse risk by daughter-in-law caregiver was 4.7times as high as the cases by other caregivers, while there was no abuse risk by wife. The highly aged were with a high percentage of dementia and dependence, and abuse risk for elders with incontinence, aimless wandering, sensual difficulty, etc. were higher than those for the others. Abuse risks by caregivers with features of no sympathy, being frail, having a feeling of burden of their roles and receiving no support from others in performing their duties were also high. Multiple logistic regression analysis was applied to the cases in which features of elders and caregivers were significant as a result of logistic analysis, and variables were selected by the stepwise method. The analysis has found out aimless wandering as a key factor in variables related to the subject and health injury of caregivers and no sympathy to the subject in variables related to caregivers. In complex studies of these factors, we have found that the abuse risk can be reduced even for aimlessly wandering elderly persons if the caregiver is healthy and it can also be minimized even by the caregivers having trouble in health if they have sympathy.

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The effects of burden in care-giving, difficulty in facing geriatric care, and their own attitude toward health, all of which constitute psychological stress, on the professional ac-tivities of nurses and nursing care personnel were analyzed. Based on the results, the sense of burden experienced in performing each duty was classified according to the psychological patterns to investigate the causes for the development of occupational stress. The subjects of the study were nurses and nursing care personnel who are employed at geriatric care facilities throughout the country. Through the cooperation of individuals in these two professions, 554 responses were obtained. The survey included questions on age, years of experience, basic attributes (such as work schedules and the size of each facility), one's own attitude toward health, difficulty in dealing with geriatric patients, and the burden felt in performing each duty. The study proved that the stress is related to the interpersonal relations with geriatric patients rather than to the technical problems that are dictated by an accumulation of professional experiences. In both professions it was found that the difficulty in dealing with geriatric patients tended to exacerbate the stress experienced in performing nursing duties. Furthermore, the sense of stress felt directly in performing one's daily duties, part of occupational burden, had an indirect effect on work performance. On the other hand, the heightened sence of one's own health had a positive effect on interpersonal relationship with the aged. On the subject related to perception of undue weight of nursing care, the difference between the nursing and practical nursing professions was found under a work item entitled, "nursing planning and evaluation". Those in practical nursing felt a greater burden in planning or evaluating care for the facility users. To improve cooperation between these two professions, we hope to develop plans to alleviate the burdens where differences were found.

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The relationship between the degree of knowledge company employees over the age of 50 have concerning health and welfare services and the media sources used to obtain information on such services was investigated. Eleven companies in Hokkaido and Kanto district were selected for the survey. Questionnaires were sent to those in charge of the health control of company employees and were distributed to a total of 1,107 company employees (920 men and 187 women) over the age of 40. Responses to the questionnaire were obtained from 819 people (74.0%), and the data from 397 questionnaires fully answered by people over 50 years of age were used for analysis. Descriptive statistics and the X^x test were used for the statistical analysis. The results showed that elderly company workers did not acquire information concerning health and welfare services from only one media source but, rather, that they used several different media sources, which were selected on the basis of content and the needs of the individual.

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The purpose of this research was to clarify the invariability of factor structure of QOL index. We examined gender and age differences in the factorial structure of QOL index using simultaneous factor analysis, constrained all parameters equally, with two representative samples of elderly community residents. The subjects were the elderly above 65 years old living at A town (1,152) and K village (942) in Okayama prefecture. The result showed that the model containing 9 items loading on three first - order factor and one second-order factor was found to fit gender and age datas adequately, GF1 being above 0.9 and RMSEA below 0.05. Given these results, QOL index is multidementional on the Level of first-order factor and on the second-order, a unidementional interpretation is more appropriate

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