An exploration of emotional health in nursing home residents: Making the pieces fit

From early childhood to death, there are few things that are more important to the average individual than independence. The desire for autonomy certainly does not end when a person enters a nursing home. It is, however, impacted by both physical and emotional health. The purpose of the pilot descriptive correlational study reported here was 2-fold: to examine relationships between the emotional health factors of loneliness and depression of residents in a nursing home and to determine if the standardized loneliness and depression scales were appropriate for identification of the conditions in this population.