This study was attempted to investigate the effect of sociodemographic traits, health related traits, self-efficacy, depression, trait-anger and anger expression of the elderly women with hypertension on health promoting behavior (HPB), using a hierarchical regression analysis.
A cross-sectional research design was used for this study and data were collected from June 23, 2014 to December 27, 2014. The subjects of this study were a total of 208 women aged 65 and older who were diagnosed with hypertension by physicians and living in the communities of G city and N city of Gyeonggi-do, understanding the purpose of this study and agreeing to participate. The participants completed the self-report questionnaires and collected data were analyzed with the SPSS 20.0 program.

The results of this study are as follows:

1. With regard to the sociodemographic traits and health related traits of the elderly women with hypertension, religion (t=-1.98, p=.049) and the number of exercise per week(F=29.79, p<.001) had a significant difference in HPB. However, no significant difference was found between age, educational level, living with spouse, Occupation, Monthly income, perceived health Status, smoking, drinking, hypertension medication, hypertension education experience and BMI and HPB.

2. From the analysis of correlation between the HPB of the elderly women with hypertension and self-efficacy, depression and anger, it was found that self-efficacy and anger-control had a positive correlation, while depression had a negative correlation with HPB.

3. An analysis was made for the effect of sociodemographic traits, health related traits, self-efficacy, depression, trait-anger and anger expression on HPB. The finding shows that doing exercise (β=.36, p<.001) had the most significant influence on the HPB of the elderly women with hypertension, followed by depression (β=-.31, p<.001), trait-anger (β=.21, p=.002), anger-control (β=.20, p<.001), religion (β=.18, p=.001) and self-efficacy (β=.18, p=.003). 49% of HPB was explained by the variables in Model 4.

As such, it was found that the major factors affecting the HPB of the elderly women with hypertension were in the order of exercise (health related trait), depression, trait-anger and anger-control (emotional factors), religion (sociodemographic trait) and self-efficacy (cognitive factor). However, it is reasonable to exercise caution to generalize the results of this study to the entire elderly women with hypertension because the study was conducted through questionnaires on the elderly women with hypertension living in the Gyeonggi region, represented by random sampling.
Despite this limitation, however, exercise was found to be the most important factor for the HPB of the elderly women with hypertension, followed by depression, trait-anger, anger-control and self-efficacy. In particular, trait-anger and anger-control, which are psychological factors, were identified to have more important influence on the HPB than self-efficacy. Thus, when planning a program to promote the health of the elderly women with hypertension, psychological characteristics need to be first considered for nursing intervention.