Elderly's Viewpoints on Components of Age-Friendly Cities: A Cross Sectional Study

Background. The concept of age-friendly cities has been introduced by the World Health Organization in order to pay more attention to the elderly. In Iran, this issue is more important due to demographic changes and age conditions. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the views of the elderly in Tabriz city of Iran about some indicators of age-friendly cities. Methods. In this cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study, 351 elderly people from the 6 centers in Tabriz were selected as the participants of the study through simple random method. The data collection tool was the standard questionnaire of the World Health Organization (WHO) in an age- friendly city. To analyze the data, both descriptive statistics (frequency, frequency percentage, mean and standard deviation) and analytical statistics (analysis of variance and t-test) were used using SPSS software ver.16. at a significance level of 0.05. Results. Among the four indicators studied, the health component had the highest average 44.57 (11.81) and then the components of social respect with a mean score of 38.5 (11.5), participation in social relations 34.8 (9.12) and the cultural and recreational index 32.86 (10.54) (range 1-100) were found to gain high means, respectively. A significant relationship between gender and marriage with cultural-recreational component (P = 0.002) was also observed. Conclusion. Regarding the fact that none of the four indicators of age-friendly cities in Tabriz were standard, so the managers of organizations incharge of aging need to make an attempt to achieve the desired conditions