Objective: The purpose of this study was to construct a scale that measures the meaningful roles of the elderly andtheir performance, and to compare the performance of such roles in elderly people who consider themselveshappy. Methods: The participants of this study were 121 elderly people aged 60 or older. The survey tool was aquestionnaire consisting of 23 items. It consists of general characteristics, a performance scale of meaningful rolesand a subjective happiness scale. In this study, we created 10 roles for elderly people and defined each rolethrough a literature review, as well as how each individual performs their meaningful roles. The data wereanalyzed using descriptive statistics, a Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, Kruskal-Wallis test, andMann-Whitney U test. Results: As the results indicate, the group of elderly people having numerous meaningful roles showed asignificantly high happiness score. A high correlation was shown in the happiness in the elderly with a lot ofinteractions such as with students, workers, friends, and family members, and participating in organizations,whereas having roles such as hobbies, volunteering, caregiving, home care, and religious participation showed alow correlation. Conclusion: This study proposed an evaluation method that quantitatively measures the degree of meaningful roletype and confirms that the happiness of the elderly is significantly increased when their score of meaningful roleperformance is high. This study can be used as basic data for the development of evaluation tools for a meaningfulrole performance.

Meaningful Role, Role, Elderly, Happiness, Role valuable, Role performance