Social exclusion domains of the elderly: A systematic review

Background: The elderly are considered as one of the vulnerable groups as they are subjected to the risk of decrease of participation in different domains of their life due to losing their jobs, a drop in salary and the increase of health-related problems. The current research was aimed to seek the elderly social exclusion domains in various countries around the world.

Methods: This systematic review analyzed the published studies from 1999 to 2013. The articles were searched using the keywords of social exclusion along with old people, aging, elderly both in Persian and English in Google search engine and the Iranian and international databases. From among 77 studies obtained, 16 studies met the inclusion criteria for this research.

Results: the findings indicated that the majority of studies (9) were conducted in Britain and the most common logical model was distributional and relational approach. Indicators were categorized in 5 domains: economic, social, health, environmental and neighborhood, and discrimination and elderly-oriented. In 50 percent of studies, access or lack of access to services, civil participations and social relations, in 12.5 percent of studies, access to proper health and in 18.7 percent of studies, living in secure environment and neighborhood were the indicators which attracted the most attention in evaluating the elderly social exclusion.

Conclusion: Generally, choosing a logical and proper model to design and evaluate social exclusion contributed to decreasing the problems of social exclusion evaluation. Using the data gathered in family panels can also facilitate access to the data related to periodical evaluation of social exclusion.