This study is to investigate the influences of the role activities of the elderly on their ego integrity and to find the factors contributing to forming the ego integrity in old age. To collect the data for our study, we interviewed 321 elderly men and women over 60 years old residing in the city of Jinju and the goon of Guchangf or 20days from Aug. 2nd to Aug .21st in 2009. We processed the acquired data with SPSS12.0. The degree of ego integrity depending on the general characteristics of the elderly was evaluated by on way analysis of variance. Pearson correlation and multipler regression analysis were per formed to find the influence of the role activities of the elderly on their ego integrity.
We verified the reliability and the validity of questionnaires to evaluate the role activities and ego integrity by computing Cronbach's alpha. The Cronbach's alpha was 0.913 for the role activity case and 0.874 for the ego integrity case. As a result of our analyses, we made following conclusions. First, among various roles of the elderly, a role as a group member, a role as a believer, and a role as a spouse were revealed to be the major factors to raise the ego integrity. Second, among general characteristics of the elderly, a residence type, health status, a subjective notion of economic status turned out to contribute to building ego integrity of the elderly.
Therefore, for the elderly to complete the ego integrity, social supports should be provided to help the elderly conduct these role activities more faithfully. Particularly, social systems are required for the elderly to fulfill 1) a group member role to exchange essential information for living and share various emotions with other group members, 2) a believer role to help building strong willpower, 3) a spouse(parent) role to give a birth to and raise good children. Also, a social policy to aid the elderly in achieving economic independence with savings or pensions to provide for retirement should be established.