Factors associated with older adult perception of age friendliness of their environment; the role played by loneliness, technology use and mobility: A Quantitative Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) publication on Age-friendliness of environments (AFE) imagines the future cities to become more age-friendly to harness the latent potential of older adults, especially those who have restricted mobility. AFE has important implications for older adults in maintaining social connections, independence, and successful ageing-in-place. However, technology is notably absent in the eight intersecting domains of AFE that WHO imagines improving older adult wellbeing, and we investigated whether technology should form a ninth domain.
Objective:
Whilst mobility was severely restricted, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to test how older adults’ perception of their AFE changed and what role technology was playing. Our study examined how Life Space Mobility (LSM), a concept for assessing patterns of functional mobility over time, and loneliness, impacted perceived AFE and the moderating effect of technology. It also explores whether technology should play a greater role as the ninth domain of WHO’s imagination of AFE’s of the future.
Methods:
In this cross-sectional quantitative observation study, data from 92 older adults aged 65-89 years were collected in England during March 2020 to June 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Life-space Questionnaire, Technology Experience Questionnaire, UCLA Loneliness Scale, and Age-Friendly Environment Assessment Tool (AFEAT) were used. Correlation and moderation analyses were used to investigate relationships between variables.
Results:
Most participants (>93%) had not left their immediate town in previous 4 weeks from interview. Restricted LSM was positively correlated to AFEAT, i.e., rising physical isolation was linked to better perception of AFE; however, we discovered this result was due to the moderating impact of increased use of technology, and that restricted LSM actually had a negative effect on AFE. Loneliness was correlated negatively with perception of AFE, but technology use was found to moderate the impact of loneliness.
Conclusions:
Pandemic-related LSM restrictions impacted perceived AFE and loneliness negatively, but technology played a moderating role. Findings demonstrate that technology could be considered as a ninth domain in WHO’s assessment of AFE for older adults, and that there is a need for its explicit acknowledgement.
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