Social work and social education as basic pillars for the attention and cognitive stimulation of our old people

Abstract

This article responds to the desire within the fields of social work and social education to justify the need to expand social services to protect and pay greater attention to the elderly in order to encourage active ageing and improve their quality of life.

The main contribution of the article is to stress the importance of studying the negative beliefs elderly persons have about their own memories. Only by knowing what the elderly think can we help improve their expectations of themselves, indirectly prevent them from becoming distressed by their slight memory losses, help them enjoy their golden years and convey to them that their memories will improve with adequate cognitive stimulation.

To achieve these proposed goals, the study uses experimental methods, and more specifically, a group comparison experimental design. A group of elderly persons living in different senior citizen residences of the Autonomous Community of Madrid were studied. Although the final results are still being evaluated, enough significant feedback has been extracted from that study for this article.