‘EFFECTIVENESS OF LAUGHTER THERAPY ON QUALITY OF LIFE (QOL) AMONG INMATES RESIDING IN OLD AGE HOME, MOTHIRAKANNY’

The importance of laughter therapy is to provide physical and psychological well being. This study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of laughter therapy on quality of life among inmates residing in selected old age homes. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of laughter therapy on quality of life among inmates in selected old age homes. Quasi experimental One group's pre test post test research design was selected to determine the effectiveness of laughter therapy. The sample included 42 elderly people and sampling techniques is purposive sampling technique. Modified WHO –QOL questionnaire was used for assessing the quality of life under 4 domains, which include physical, psychological, social and spiritual domains. Laughter therapy was administered for 5 consecutive days in the Old age Home. Majority of samples (35.71) are between the age group of 60-70, 50% are males and 73.8% of samples belong to Christians. During the pretest, 52.38% of them have a good quality of life whereas, during the post test, 95.23% of them had a very good quality of life. None of them had average or poor quality of life during post test. The difference between the pretest and post test scores of Quality of Life is significant at 0.01 level in all domains, as the obtained paired t'value (8.71) is greater than the table value (2.02). Hence It is concluded that laughter therapy is effective in improving the quality of life of elderly people.