Senior dance as a resource of the occupational therapist with older adults: Contributions in the quality of life

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze and identify possible contributions in the quality of life of older adult participants of senior dance workshops applied as a resource of the occupational therapist. It is an exploratory, descriptive, interventional, longitudinal prospective study with a qualitative and quantitative approach. For the selection of the sample, the elderly were submitted to a cognitive screening through the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), for the analysis of the quality of life, the 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) was applied before and after the workshop. To collect qualitative data, the older adults participated in two focus groups, before and after the workshop. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, paired T-test of the difference between two means and content analysis. The workshop was developed over 12 weekly meetings, lasting 90 minutes each. After finishing the workshop, it was observed improvement in the quality of life, with emphasis on the individual averages of the physical aspects (pre-workshop: 69.4, post-workshop: 83.3) and emotional aspects (pre-workshop: 74.1; post-workshop: 96.3). When the Student's T-test was used to compare the means of the group as a whole before and after the workshop, it was possible to note that the domains "functional capacity" (p=0.01), "social aspects" (p=0.04) and "mental health" (p=0.02) presented significant improvement. Therefore, the present study pointed out the benefits of a senior dance workshop being used as a resource for the occupational therapist with the elderly, and the results obtained lead to the conclusion that the dance workshop contributed to an improvement in the quality of life of elderly people who participated in it.