<p> As people's life-expectancy prolongs with advanced medical treatments, numbers of individuals who experience widowhood in later life are expected to increase. As a result, grief work will be one of the common challenges that social workers and older adults will face. The purpose of this project was to develop a grant proposal for the Pathways Volunteer Hospice in Lakewood, California, and to identify funding sources for designing a mindfulness focused bereavement support group program for older widows who are age 60 years and over. With funding resources provided by the Weingart Foundation, the proposed program aims to educate participants on the principles of mindfulness and how they can integrate mindfulness principles and philosophy into their grieving process to better facilitate their coping with their loss. The proposed program will be based on empirically supported methods, such as, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. The actual submission, and/or funding, of this grant was not required for successful completion of this thesis.</p>

<p> Spirituality has been recognized as a positive factor in the lives of older adults, especially as it influences their emotional, mental, and physical well-being. This convenience sample study included 17 older adults residing at a faith based continuing care retirement community in Florida. The sample was represented by Caucasian older adults with an average age of 84 years, highly educated, majority Protestant and mostly female. Spiritual life reviews were conducted using spiritual life maps (Hodge, 2005) and semi-structured interview questions. Erikson's epigenetic stage of ego-integrity was used along with Butler's life review process and Tornstam's gerotranscendence as a conceptual framework for understanding late life development and spirituality in older adults. This mostly qualitative study used a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to analyze the responses to the open-ended interview questions about spirituality across the life-time. Ego-integrity was measured at the beginning and end of the spiritual life review study. </p><p> Paired t-tests found that participation in the spiritual life review did not influence the ego integrity scores of participants. Specifically, there were no statistically significant difference between the pre ego integrity score (M=82.94, SD= 8.235) and the post ego integrity score (M=84.47, SD= 7.551); t (16) = -.769 p= .453. However, in comparison, the qualitative analysis revealed that the spiritual life review does influence ego-integrity in some participants. Additionally, the spiritual life review confirms gerotranscendence and contributes to information about spiritual development in the lives of older adults. The conclusion offers a discussion about the study's limitations, strengths, implications for future research, and suggestions for clinical practice.</p>

<p> In the late 1980's assisted living emerged as a self-proclaimed new style of providing long-term care and supportive services. Assisted living as espoused by its early proponents and by industry leaders embodied certain specific philosophical tenets, such as dignity, autonomy, meeting scheduled and unscheduled needs and aging in place, in their daily operations. These tenets distinguished assisted living from other forms of institutional care such as nursing home care. In the past twenty years the assisted living industry has matured and grown substantially. However, despite the maturing of the industry and the general agreement on the basic tenets little is known about the degree to which the industry embodies these principles. </p><p> In addition public policy and consumer preferences have grown in their focus on substituting assisted living for nursing home care. Moreover, the degree to which assisted living can and does substitute for nursing home care has been largely unexamined. Elder care advocates and researchers have more and more called attention to the increasing acuity level of assisted living residents. </p><p> This study consists of three related components, each of which will broaden the understanding of current assisted living facilities and their residents. The first study examines person environment fit in assisted living. Lawton's theory of person environment fit, has largely defined the construction and physical environment of assisted living since the 1980's. Changes in Lawton's theory were proposed by Guiata and Jones in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2012 in reaction to the increased level of dementia in assisted living residents. A third non-theoretical analysis using exploratory factor is designed assist with development of new constructs in person environment fit theory. The second study examines changes in assisted living facilities and residents from 1999 to 2010. This study uses the only two national surveys of assisted living, The 1999 National Survey of Assisted Living and the 2010 National Survey of Residential Care Facilities. This study will examine both facility level and resident level characteristics to explicate resident acuities and to examine the degree to which facilities are accommodating these acuities. The third study examines facility characteristics associated with discharge of residents from assisted living facilities. Understanding resident discharge from assisted living will give a better understanding how assisted living facilities meet scheduled and unscheduled needs of residents as well as embody the philosophical concept of aging in place. </p><p> The contribution of this research is improved understanding of the current assisted living facilities and residents and better understand the importance of facility characteristics in person environment fit and in aging in place. This contribution is significant because assisted living residents are a vulnerable population with no protection under federal statutes and limited protection in most states. If indeed, as advocates and researchers assert, assisted living residents mirror nursing home residents in acuity then this research will assist with developing policies to protect this vulnerable population.</p>

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Persuading people to adopt and maintain a regular physical activity program are two major challenges facing public health. Providing social support may increase the adoption and adherence rate of participation in exercise programs. It was hypothesized that participation in a 12-week WellREP designed to meet the goals of the ACSM and CDC with respect to appropriate physical activity programming for older adults would result in improvements in functional fitness, balance, and daily activity. The WellREP group consisted of 18 older women (X= 73 ± 7 yrs). The WellREP group met at a senior center for 12 wk, 2d•wk for a 50 min. training program and used an Omron pedometer to measure daily physical activity throughout the week. The Control group consisted of 15 older adults (X= 75 ± 6 yrs). Program effectiveness was assessed using the Senior Fitness Test to measure functional fitness (chair stand, arm curl, sit and reach, up & go, scratch test, and 12-min walk), balance: movement velocity, endpoint excursion, maximum endpoint excursion, and directional control for forward, right, left and back movements, pedometer measured daily physical activity, and weight. No differences between the WellREP group and the control group existed at baseline. All functional measures, excluding flexibility, in the WellREP group exhibited an 8% to 46% significant increases as compared to a -3% to 8% change in the CON group. Significant improvements in limits of stability measures were only observed in the maximum excursion measure (forward - 20% and backward - 23%). Significant improvements were observed in daily physical activity. Participants in the WellREP group increased their STEPS by 64% compared to a 5% increase in the CON group. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Program of Gerontology.

<p>An extensive body of research documents the strong influence of social relationships, social support, social integration and social networks on well-being. Nonetheless, conceptual clarity remains elusive and these terms are often used interchangeably, precluding confident conclusions and hindering cross-study comparisons. Guided by social network analysis, the social convoy model and the life course framework, I measure social network structure and composition through the use of typologies. I then examine the influences of social network structure and composition on an array of health indicators, including self-rated health, psychological distress and self-esteem. </p><p>This study uses data from the Americans' Changing Lives Survey, a nationally representative longitudinal panel survey of adults aged 25+ interviewed in 1986, 1989, 1994 and 2001/2002. I use hierarchical cluster analysis to create social network typologies from data on respondent reports of close confidants and develop two typologies, one for social network structure and the other for social network composition. In cross-sectional analyses, I use logistic regression and Poisson regression to examine the associations between these two social network typologies and poor/fair self-rated health, high self-esteem, and counts of depressive symptoms. I also perform two sets of longitudinal analyses to determine the predictive utility of network structure and composition for health. First, I use OLS regression to examine whether the social network typologies predict residual change scores for self-rated health, psychological distress, and self-esteem both 3 and 8 years after the baseline survey. Second, I use autoregressive cross-lagged models within a structural equation framework to disentangle the effects of social causation and social selection on the relationship between social network structure and the three indicators of health mentioned above.</p><p>The typologies representing social network structure and composition are strongly related to important social and demographic factors. In addition, there are strong and significant cross-sectional associations between these typologies and indicators of mental health, although their association with self-rated health is weak at best. The typologies are highly predictive of changes in mental health across waves, although again, they are not strongly related to changes in self-rated health. Lastly, this dissertation finds strong support for both social causation and selection processes at work in the relationships between social network structure and self-rated health and psychological distress. Support social selection, but not social causation, was found in regards to self-esteem.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis examines how current demographics and evolving family dynamics act as a catalyst for the evolution of a building in response to how the elderly can successfully age in place. Through the design of a residential building in an inner city neighborhood of Calgary, Alberta, this thesis explores the potential for architecture to accommodate diverse families (such as singles, couples, single parent families, and the elderly) in one development, maintaining existing relationships, promoting social cohesiveness, and providing an informal network of support for the elderly. The project investigates how architecture might facilitate the integration of the elderly through ?exible relationships of building programme and unit variation.

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No description available.

There is literature based on masters athletes and their involvement in sports at the later stages of life. Masters athletes are exercise-trained individuals who compete in athletic events at a high level well beyond a typical retirement age (Tanaka & Seals, 2008). These athletes vary widely in age but are typically older than 35 years, with many more over the ages of 50 and well into old age. The research questions guiding this study included; (a) what are the media representation of masters athletes, and how are they used to generate meanings around aging, sports and the aging body and (b) what are the implications of these meanings on how the aging body is represented to the audience. A qualitative (i.e., case study) approach was used to explore what meanings were generated around aging and sports through media narratives in relation to aging successfully. Media data in the form of sports magazines (i.e., Runner’s World and Lexis-Nexis data base) were compiled for the data analysis. This research focused specifically on two cases, 81year old Ed Whitlock, a Canadian long distance marathon runner, and 77 year-old Jeanne Daprano, an American masters track and field athlete. The data included (n=41 Ed Whitlock, n= 17 Jeanne Daprano). The data were analyzed via an inductive thematic analysis (see Braun & Clarke, 2006). The following central themes emerged a) life-long involvement in sports (higher order themes: earlier sporting experience, triumphant return, uninterrupted engagement), (b) performance narratives (serious contenders, reasoning for performance, systematic training, an individualized approach), and (c) decline narratives (resistance to declines in old age, sports related injuries, maintenance of performance). This study highlights how both athletes were depicted in the media narratives, demonstrating that their involvement in sports in later life provided an alternate way to view the aging process. The findings from this study seek to extend the understanding of masters athletes, by contextualization how they challenge some of the decline narratives associated with old age.