Subjective Quality of Life and Perceived Adequacy of Social Support

Many African countries, the elderly are the sources of wisdom, the guardians of the mysteries and the laws in which the cultural heritage of communities is expressed. The common African adage beautifully expresses this idea, 'If an African elderly dies, it is a library that burns'. Particularly in Ethiopian culture, there is a broad range of behavior that really shows the elderly is indeed valued including children's respect, obedience, loyalty, material provision, and physical care to parents. However, in more recent years, Ethiopia's elderly seem to have come rather marginalized a great deal particularly in the cities (HelpAge, 2001) possibly because of changes in the value systems, shifts in the dominant source of knowledge from the old to the young persons, retirement that displaces the elderly to a state of economic dependency, expansion of urbanization with a culture of its own, influence of the western culture that values youthfulness and so on.