A Statistical Review on Religious activity and Spirituality in Maintaining Active Living among Muslim Elderly

Abstract

Active ageing enables people to realise their potential for physical, social and mental wellbeing in leading a healthy lifestyle. Malaysia has to classify the people who are under active ageing as the environment and culture may different from other countries especially for the Muslim elderly. The Muslim elderly people focus on their spiritual needs which led to the importance of their culture, belief, and religiosity besides the focus of being healthy, socialising, and being physically fit. Therefore the study is ideally aimed at giving introspection to the active ageing for the Muslims in Malaysia and the roles of religious and spiritual in their active living. A questionnaire survey has been conducted among 411 of Muslim elderly within 10 district of Johor. A descriptive analyses and Likert scale were used to tap the frequency level of active ageing determinants. Finding suggests that the spirituality and religious activity is important for Muslim elderly to pursue their active living. The main contributions of this study are the determination of active ageing for Muslim elderly and provide the guidelines to various parties for the improvement of a new policy that can cater the elderly people’s needs, health care, social life, lifestyle, and facilities for a better living condition.