Fruitful in Old Age: Future Skills as a Pathway for Older Thai Adult Women To Live in a Super-Aged Society
摘要
By 2036, Thailand will be the second country in Southeast Asia, after Singapore, to become a super-aged society. Thailand has been preparing for this situation for some time. However, only a small number of concrete policies that truly respond to the needs of older adults have been implemented. Furthermore, recent studies on older adult women in Thailand are limited. Hence, this research explored the perspectives of older adult women in Thailand, particularly with respect to their needs in the context of developing future skills, with the goal of identifying an alternative way of improving their quality of life. This qualitative research employed a focus group alongside design thinking techniques, including brainstorming, the 2 × 2 matrix, and dot voting. Data collected from 28 older adult women in the focus group showed that certain key elements, including future skills, can help older adult women cope with changes. The most important skill identified in this research was health literacy, and other future skills that are compatible with the relevant social and cultural contexts were detected. The findings of this research reflect the distinctions among different future skills developed in response to government policies that focus on the promotion of lifetime human potential. This approach can thus help policymakers obtain insights from the data and apply those insights in practice.