The Social Marginalization of the Elderly – Probabilistic Analysis Through Markov Models

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to identify how important is for the elderly to attend day centers in the fight against social marginalization. The research is quantitative, providing a new tool that can be applied in all social sciences. The study is made on a main sample of 200 persons, which was divided into two subsamples: 100 elderly who are attending a day center and 100 elderly who are not. Using these subsamples, the paper realizes a probabilistic and comparative evaluation of the social marginalization problem using elements from the reliability theory (Markov models) which are adapted to the gerontological social work domain. Implementing these models, as it is indicated by the obtained numbers and graphics, the comparative study between the two subsamples is proving that the probability of an elderly who is attending a day center to be in social marginalization situation is significantly smaller.