A Qualitative Study on Attitude, Acceptability, and Adaptation for Home-delivered Meal Services in the Korean Elderly from the Perspective of Life Context

The purpose of this study was to suggest the strategies for improvement ofhome-delivered meal services for the elderly, to identify reasons for recipients to getstarted with the services and to evaluate the attitude, acceptability and adaptation ofrecipients to the services from the perspective of life context. Methods: The data was collected through face-to-face in-depth interviews with eighteenlow-income elderly recipients of home-delivered meals and analyzed using a qualitativeresearch method. Results: The results were deduced as four themes which comprised of long-termvulnerable socioeconomic contexts resulted in entry to the services, conflicting acceptabilityto the services, passive adaptation to taking the services, and positive practices to copewith supplement free meals or other services. The service participation was initiatedbecause of a combination of prolonged, vulnerable socioeconomic contexts, includingpoverty and unexpected life events such as diseases, disability, living alone, aging andunemployment. With regard to taking the services, conflicting acceptability wasobserved: positive aspects including saving living cost and good quality of meals, andnegative aspects including lack of a tailored service and feeling of stigma. Although therecipients needed an individualized service, they did not express their needs anddemands for the services and they accepted the unavailability as an accustomed,prolonged vulnerable socioeconomic context. With regard to lack of tailored services,either self-solution such as modification of eating patterns or community-based networkand services were used. Conclusions: We suggest that a system to concretely identify recipients’ attitude,acceptability and adaptation for home-delivered meal services should be developed inthe establishment of a tailored nutrition support system for the low-income elderly.