Background/Rationale: Better-educated older Chinese have lower levels of distress than do those who are less-educated and are more likely to engage in cognitively stimulating activities, have better economic circumstances, and participate in more physical activity. Research also shows that seniors that have a lower education level would spend most of their time watching television or playing Mahjong at home during their leisure time (Ross, 2008).

We report on the opportunities and challenges of implementing the Recreation Therapy (RT) aspect of a grant-funded, multidisciplinary wellness project at subsidized senior housing facility with 160 seniors aged 60 plus that was designed to address some of the types of issues identified in the literature. Data collection was attempted and recreation therapy interventions were conducted in the context of the daily lives of a diverse group of residents representing 5 linguistic groups: Chinese, English, Russian, Farsi, and Korean with Chinese as the largest proportionately.

Method/Approach: The grant-funded multidisciplinary team examined the needs assessment data from a recently conducted survey and semi-structured interviews; proposed a series of tailored wellness interventions based on these data; conducted 3 community forums to obtain resident feedback to target wellness related needs. The Leisure Attitude Scale (Ragheb & Beard, 1982) was to be used as a paired pre- and post design and a modification of the scale with 6 questions exacted was to be administered before and after each Recreation Therapy session.

Results: Six SJSU undergraduate students, supervised by faculty, participated in delivering the program. The project enabled students to learn skills necessary for effective practice such as: learning about different measures and interventions provided by various professions; opportunities to apply skills learned in the classroom with older adults; and work in the context of a subsidized housing community. Faculty gained useful insights into implementing data collection and Recreation Therapy interventions for non-English-speaking older adults who are very traditional. Outcomes unique to the RT aspect of this multidisciplinary project are as follows: first, no data collected could be used and most of the surveys were not employed; second, it was extremely difficult to design RT interventions until a relationship with the residents was created; third, RT interventions that were effective include various types of chair yoga, tai-chi, ribbon movement, waltz, Zumba and internet education. Anecdotal observations report that RT interventions improved socialization of participating residents and decreased feelings of loneliness. Limitations included: language barriers, cultural barriers to understanding the importance of leisure, faulty or age-inappropriate aspects of equipment, cross-cultural conflict and division among the residents, and difficulty finding staff from the facility.

Conclusions: The implementation of Recreation Therapy in this multicultural setting provided significant opportunities to better understand effective ways to conduct research and to facilitate therapeutic recreation experiences to highly culturally traditional people. Possible strategies for next steps in the evolution of this partnership will be presented based on a collaborative examination (faculty and students) of the data.