The social contribution includes the involvement of the elderly to the family, economic and other civic affairs. Contribution to the family is measured in terms of involvement in decision making, household chores, and taking care of the family members. Decision making includes budgeting finances, consulting one’s opinion about any matter, asking permission to leave the house, deciding on education of the grandchildren career of parents and grand children and the like.
Participation in the household chores includes sweeping, cooking, or any work that the elderly can perform. It can also be categorized as daily, weekly and occasional activities. The daily activities were cooking, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, caring for the grandchildren, watering the plants and going to market. Weekly activities were doing the laundry, ironing the clothes and going to the church. Meanwhile, occasional activities consist of repairing damaged objects, consulting to the doctor and excursion.
Among the three types of activities, participation in daily activities had a higher percentage compared to other two and the chores commonly performed were cleaning the house and washing the dishes. Other than these, the elderly also participate in decision making and problem solving. Regarding decision making, the elderly made decisions concerning the education of their children, “morality or good character of the household members a swell as the livelihood of their children, and their decision of what to eat/cook, basic needs of the family and improvement of the house.
” In terms of participation in solving problems, not all encountered family problems with other family members, financial and family relationship, but for those who did they take part on it. Lastly, taking care of the family members is described in terms of the physical activities of child rearing and mentoring the children or the participation of the elderly in looking after the members of the Despite their age, the elderly can still perform activities and offer help to their immediate families.
This was evident in the National Council on aging Survey (Hill, 1965 cited by Ward, 1984:221) conducted in 1975. The result showed that children and grandchildren of the respondents received help from the elderly in the family: sixty-eight percent help during illness, 42 percent gave financial assistance, 39 percent provided advice, 34 percent did shopping and ran errands, and 24 percent fixed things or helped with housekeeping. Even among persons 80 and over, 57 percent helped during illness and 38 percent helped financially family.
Contribution to the Economy The common concept associate with old age is retirement. It is the inevitable occurrence for the aged because they are stereotyped as unable to fulfill the demands of the job, hence, younger people are preferred over them. The economic resources of the elderly are limited to their pensions and families’ support. Contribution in economic affairs pertains to the profession or income-generating activity of the individual.
As to their contribution to economy, in America, the elderly who receive inadequate pension are motivated to look for gainful work (Hooyman and Kiyak, 1993) either part-time or full-time. Other elderly, whose abilities to perform tasks required in a certain occupation have diminished, are force to depend on their families for financial support (Doming, et al. , 1994). A number of elderly are still economically active despite their age.
According to the U. S Senate Special Committee on Aging (1992, cited by Hooyman and Kiyak, 1993: 336): Among those over age 65, only 17 percent of men and 8 percent of women are in the labor force…Older workers, whose comprise less than three percent of the total labor force are concentrated in jobs that initially require considerable education and a long training process, e. g. , managerial and professional positions or self employment, or those with flexible retirement policies. A trend in part time work is also increasing among the aged.
This is evident in the percentage of women who are employed in part-time work, which has reached over 50 percent of the retired workers (Sheppard, 1988; AARP, 1991 cited by Hooyman and Kiyak, 1993). The desire of the old people to continue working is also seen in other studies “which gave found that other 52 percent of retired workers return to work within four years, largely for economic reasons, moving back and forth from full or partial retirement into retirement (Butler, Anderson, Burkhauser, 1989; Myers, 1991 cited by Hooyman and Kiyak, 1993:338).