The effects of an intergenerational recreational program on children's attitudes toward the elderly

The purpose of this study was to investigate and determine what effect an intergenerational recreational program has on children's attitudes toward the elderly. The subproblems addressed were: 1. To develop an intergenerational recreational program to meet theoretically based objectives. 2. To determine what effect the developed intergenerational recreational program has on children's attitudes toward the elderly. The research involved an intergenerational recreational program between four-and five-year old pre-schoolers at First United Methodist Church, Oak Ridge, Tennessee and elderly individuals enrolled in a geriatric day-care program entitled Keystone Eldercare located at the same church facility. The sample consisted of 21 children and 12 elderly participants. The week prior to the implementation of the program, all 21 of the children were administered a modified version of the CATE Semantic Differential-Old People, a test developed at the University of Maryland in 1976 to be used with children between the ages of 3 and 11. This same test was administered one week following the completion of the program. After the administration of the pretest, 11 of the pre-schoolers were randomly assigned to the experimental group and the other 10 were assigned to the control group. The experimental group received the intergenerational recreational program twice a week for 5 weeks for thirty minutes a session. The control group functioned normally without change in the pre-school curriculum. Recreational activities between elders and pre-schoolers included activities such as singing, dancing, storytelling, games, parties, crafts, and drama. An independent t-test with an alpha level set at p < .05 was used to analyze both pre-test scores and post-test scores for between-group comparisons. Because of random sampling, pre-test scores were not significantly different between experimental and control groups. Upon post-testing of the pre-schoolers, there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups' attitudes toward the elderly. Therefore, the null hypothesis that there will be no significant difference in children's attitudes toward the elderly following a six-week intergenerational recreational program was not rejected.