Korean senior citizens turned out to be less happy with their life at home than abroad, a recent poll said on Monday. 

The Institute for Aging Studies (IAS) of Korea and the Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York (KCS) of the United States jointly conducted a survey to get a glimpse of the lives of elderly Koreans at home and abroad. 

"This is the first time of its kind to compare and analyze the way of living and thinking between Koreans in their early 60s in the United States and Korea," said Prof. Lee Chu-il of the Hallym University, who led the survey in Korea. 

The survey was conducted for 17 months until last April, as pollsters visited and interviewed 254 elderly people ages 60 or over in New York and 1,276 peers in Seoul and Chunchun, Kangwon Province. 

In the survey, 26 percent of gray-haired citizens here said that they often felt sad, while 15 percent of the respondents in New York said so. As for loneliness, 50 percent of the Korean group professed that they felt lonely, higher than 33 percent in the New York group. 

As for pocket money, the Koreans spent an average of 170,000 won ($142) per month and they regarded themselves unhealthy due to drinking or smoking while the members in the New York group spent 300,000 won and they thought they were healthy thanks to exercise and dieting. 

About 37 percent of the respondents here confessed they found their lives meaningless. Only 14 percent of New Yorkers said so. In reply to other questions, Korean seniors were more pessimistic than their counterparts. 

Ironically, however, 21 percent of elderly Koreans were satisfied with their sexual life, twice as many as the figure in the Big Apple. 

When they came down with a disease, a staggering 57 percent of the local Koreans expected their children to take care of them but only seven percent of the overseas Koreans relied on their offspring. 

Interestingly, more than half of the New York residents replied they would fall into the category of low or middle-income brackets, if they returned to Korean society. 

In all, the `happiness index' of Korean senior citizens proved to be much lower than that of their American counterparts in this study,'' said Prof. Lee of the Hallym University. 

The KCS which was established in New York in 1973 is a social service agency to support and assist members of the Korean community. The IAS came into being in 2002 in response to Korea becoming another rapidly aging society with falling birth rates.