The effect of reminiscing group therapy on personal control of nursing home elders

Abstract

A non-equivalent pretest-posttest control group nested design was utilized to measure the effect of reminiscing group therapy on personal control of nursing home elders. Personal control, or the belief that one has the ability to influence one's environment, has much support in the literature as a correlate of psychological well- being. Therefore, a treatment that will increase personal control is projected to increase psychological well-being and subsequent total well-being. Reminiscing group therapy is hypothesized to increase personal control by helping elders generalize past competencies to present day environmental situations. In this study personal control was measured by the Desired Control Measure. Four nursing homes were selected and randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. Subjects (N = 40), who met the selection criteria, were assigned to the group in the nursing home in which they were living. The experimental subjects (n = 20) participated in reminiscing groups of 10 subjects each which met weekly for 8 weeks. Analysis of variance using a nested design demonstrated no significant difference in personal control between the experimental and control groups. However, additional analysis suggested an increase in self-rated health in the experimental group, but not in the control group. Implications for future research were cited.