ABSTRACT
Social participation is linked to healthy aging and the maintenance of functional independence in older individuals. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between social participation and orderly's mental health. Totally 380 people, aged over 60 residing in city of Hamadan were participated in the study. The participants completed a researcher-tailored inventory assessing their social participation and a GHQ-28 questionnaire assessing their mental health. Required social and demographic data was also gathered. Findings showed that the elderly, relatively, enjoyed good level of mental health. In general, mental health was significantly associated with social participation. However, when looking at subscales, only somatic and social performance had a significant positive relationship with social participation. Social participation can be of effective factors on which policy makers and therapists can plan to improve the mental health of aged people
ABSTRACT
Tourette syndrome is a disease with vocal and motor tics. This disorder is co-morbid with many psychiatric disorders, among which obsessive-compulsive disorder is the most common. During a one-year period, 30 patients with Tourette disorder were studied at an adolescent psychiatry referral clinic. It was an analytical-descriptive study. Subjects were selected by convenience sampling. The control group was selected from students in Tehran schools similar to the first group in terms of age and gender. K-SADS questionnaire was used to examine the existence of obsessive-compulsive disorder in both groups. The results were analyzed with SPSS software. The apparent co-morbidity of obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome was seen in this study, such that 53% of patients affected with it had obsessive-compulsive disorder. Statistics obtained was higher compared to earlier data. Although this co-morbidity was somewhat different in the two genders, it was not considered statistically significant [80% girls and 48% boys]. More focus should be laid upon the co-morbidity between Tourette and OCD. It is recommended to study patients with Tourette syndrome more extensively in terms of co-morbidity with other psychiatric disorders, especially the obsessive-compulsive disorder
ABSTRACT
The objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the 'physical wellbeing, health and motor development inventory' used to assess school readiness in ordinary and mentally retarded pre-school children. A descriptive study examining validity was conducted using random sampling. Two hundred students [160 ordinary and 40 mentally retarded children] were randomly selected from the city of Tehran. In investigating the validity of the inventory, evidence related to content validity and construct validity were used. The evidence related to content validity showed that the questions related to the domain elements of gross motor skills, fine motor skills, nutrition and safety exercises all had high correlation coefficients with the overall elements. Some of the questions related to the domain elements of sensorimotor skills, physical fitness and activities of daily living did not have acceptable correlation coefficients. However, after removing the outliers the overall validity coefficient and subsequently that of the overall test increased. The t computed for construct-related evidence was significant too. Eventually, the validity coefficients were estimated at 0.859, 0.832, 0.671, 0.585, 0.725, 0.719 and 0.719 for gross motor skills, fine motor skills, sensorimotor skills, physical fitness, activities of daily living, nutrition and safety exercises, respectively. The results indicate that the overall inventory and its elements have good validity for assessing preschool children's readiness in the domains of physical well-being, health and motor development