Operation and Development Plan of the Education Programs for Welfare for the Aged in the Buddhist Community

ABSTRACT

Welfare for the aged is an important issue that our society has to solve at the present time when Korean society has already entered an aging society. The Buddhist community also started to have an interest in welfare for the aged since the 1990s. There were lots of theoretical studies that looked at the social welfare in terms of the ideology of Buddhism in those day, but the direction of studies has turned into the Buddhist welfare based on effectiveness and reality at present. In addition, the Buddhist community is striving for qualitative growth which focuses on developing a variety of program to enhance the qualitative satisfaction of actual demanders out of quantitative expansion of the augmentation of the monk welfare and the welfare facilities for the aged within the religious body, etc. during the period. In this article , a satisfaction survey on the programs which are practically underway at the Buddhist welfare centers for the aged was conducted in order to enhance the qualitative level of the welfare for the aged in the Buddhist community. The subjects of the study with convenience sampling were 195 program participants aged 60 and over at one Buddhist welfare facility for the aged located in G-gu, Seoul City. Facility satisfaction degree of the facility users, education programs’ effectiveness and desired programs were extracted by using the convenience sampling. The primarily used data analysis methods were frequency analysis and cross tabulation analysis through SPSS. And then independent t-test and one-way ANOVA were used to determine whether there was a significant difference in the program effectiveness according to the general characteristics of the subjects.