Psychosocial Correlates of Widows in Tribal Community in Idukki District, Kerala

Abstract

Introduction: India is a country with the highest number of widows in the world (4.65 crores) and they are invisible and marginalised. It is assumed that the widows in the tribal community are highly marginalised that may lead to severe mental health problems.  Objectives: To access the resilience, depression, anxiety, stress (DASS), quality of life (QOL) and its correlates with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the tribal widows. To identify the significant predictors of QOL in the study population. Materials & Method: The Idukki district in Kerala state was purposively selected where the concentration of Hill Pulaya tribe found more in number. The sample size constitutes 80 tribal widows. The individual respondents were selected by using Tippet number table. A 25 items Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, DASS-21 and WHOQOL-BREF were used to collect the data. Result: The results show that the average current age of the tribal widows in the study area is 56.53 years. Their average years of schooling was 0.49 and 90% of them were illiterates. Majority of them were agricultural labourers (65%). Most (58%) of them were living in a joint family. About 79% of the widows were receiving a pension from the government. Majority of the tribal widows were scored high on resilience (61.3%), low on DASS (57.5%) and being equal (50% each) on QOL. The current age, years of widowhood, family income and resilience score increases, the quality of life score of the tribal widows’ decreases. Further, depression, anxiety and stress scores increases, QOL score decreases. The regression analysis shows that resilience, monthly income, years of widowhood, current age and education together have a total of 54.2% influence on the QOL of the tribal widows, with resilience being the single largest significant predictor of the QOL of tribal widows. Conclusion: Findings reveal that there is a need for providing counselling to the tribal widows to increase their QOL.

Keywords: Resilience, quality of life, depression, anxiety, stress, tribal, widows