How ‘age-friendly’ are rural communities and what community characteristics are related to age-friendliness? The case of rural Manitoba, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Since the World Health Organization introduced the concept of ‘age-friendly’ communities in 2006, there has been rapidly growing interest in making communities more age-friendly on the part of policy makers world-wide. There is a paucity of research to date, however, that has examined age-friendliness in diverse communities, particularly in rural communities. The main objective of the study reported in this paper was to examine whether age-friendliness varies across community characteristics, such as a population size. The study was based on surveys administered in 56 communities throughout Manitoba, a mid-Western Canadian province, in the context of a needs assessment process for communities that are part of the Age-Friendly Manitoba Initiative. A total of 1,373 individuals completed a survey developed to measure age-friendliness. Domains included the physical environment; housing options; the social environment; opportunities for participation; community supports and health-care services; transportation options; and communication and information. Community characteristics were derived from census data. Multi-level regression analysis indicated that the higher the percentage of residents aged 65 or older, the higher the ratings of age-friendliness overall and, specifically, ratings of the social environment, opportunities for participation, and communication and information. Moreover, small communities located within a census metropolitan area and remote communities in the far north of the province emerged as having the lowest age-friendliness ratings. These findings suggest that communities are generally responsive to the needs of their older residents. That different results were obtained for the various age-friendly domains underscores the importance of considering age-friendliness in a holistic way and measuring it in terms of a range of community features. Our study further highlights the importance of differentiating between degrees of rurality, as different patterns emerged for communities of different sizes and proximity to a larger urban centre.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".