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Hwang, Kim, and Kim: A Qualitative Study on Attitude, Acceptability, and Adaptation for Home-delivered Meal Services in the Korean Elderly from the Perspective of Life Context
Research Article

Korean Journal of Community Nutrition 2014; 19(5): 459-467.

Published online: 31 October 2014

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5720/kjcn.2014.19.5.459

A Qualitative Study on Attitude, Acceptability, and Adaptation for Home-delivered Meal Services in the Korean Elderly from the Perspective of Life Context

Ji-Yun Hwang1), Bokyoung Kim2), Kirang Kim3)

1)Nutrition Education Major, Graduate School of Education, Sangmyung University, Seoul, Korea.

2)Graduate School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.

3)Department of Food Science and Nutrition, Dankook University, Cheonan, Korea.

Corresponding author: Kirang Kim. Department of Food Science and Nutrition, College of Natural Science, Dankook University 119, Dandae-ro, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan, Chungnam 330-714, Korea. Tel: (041) 550-3472, Fax: (041) 559-7857, kirangkim@dankook.ac.kr

Received 28 April 2014       Revised 23 September 2014       Accepted 20 October 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Korean Society of Community Nutrition

(open-access):

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Objectives

The purpose of this study was to suggest the strategies for improvement of home-delivered meal services for the elderly, to identify reasons for recipients to get started with the services and to evaluate the attitude, acceptability and adaptation of recipients to the services from the perspective of life context.

Methods

The data was collected through face-to-face in-depth interviews with eighteen low-income elderly recipients of home-delivered meals and analyzed using a qualitative research method.

Results

The results were deduced as four themes which comprised of long-term vulnerable socioeconomic contexts resulted in entry to the services, conflicting acceptability to the services, passive adaptation to taking the services, and positive practices to cope with supplement free meals or other services. The service participation was initiated because of a combination of prolonged, vulnerable socioeconomic contexts, including poverty and unexpected life events such as diseases, disability, living alone, aging and unemployment. With regard to taking the services, conflicting acceptability was observed: positive aspects including saving living cost and good quality of meals, and negative aspects including lack of a tailored service and feeling of stigma. Although the recipients needed an individualized service, they did not express their needs and demands for the services and they accepted the unavailability as an accustomed, prolonged vulnerable socioeconomic context. With regard to lack of tailored services, either self-solution such as modification of eating patterns or community-based network and services were used.

Conclusions

We suggest that a system to concretely identify recipients' attitude, acceptability and adaptation for home-delivered meal services should be developed in the establishment of a tailored nutrition support system for the low-income elderly.

Keywords: the low-income elderly, qualitative method, home-delivered meal services, service acceptability

Figures and Tables

Table 1
Characteristics of the study participants
kjcn-19-459-i001

1) Mean

2) N (%)

Table 2
The in-depth interview questions
kjcn-19-459-i002
Table 3
Attitude and acceptability of the free meal services among the low-income elderly
kjcn-19-459-i003

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (No. 2013R1A1A1060704).

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