Coping Strategies Used by Seniors Going through the Normal Aging Process: Does Fear of Falling Matter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent studies show that fear of falling, a frequent fear of community-dwelling seniors, can have a negative impact on their health and quality of life. When fear of falling is intense, it can prompt individuals to limit or avoid certain activities. This activity restriction can lead to premature physical and functional decline and, ultimately, increase the risk for falls. Although activity avoidance/restriction is a common strategy used by seniors to cope with fear of falling, they may use other strategies as well to cope with this fear. However, these other strategies have received little attention to date. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed at examining and comparing coping strategies used by seniors with and without fear of falling. It also examined if fear of falling is an independent correlate of the use of coping strategies among seniors. METHODS: 288 seniors aged 65 years or over and going through the normal aging process were assessed during structured home interviews. Fear of falling was assessed through a single question (Are you afraid of falling?) and a 4-category response scale (never, occasionally, often, very often). Coping strategies used by participants were assessed with the Inventory of Coping Strategies Used by the Elderly. RESULTS: Findings show that seniors with fear of falling use several coping strategies other than activity avoidance/restriction in their daily functioning. Compared with nonfearful seniors, they tend to use a wider range of coping strategies and use them more frequently. Results also indicate that fear of falling is an independent correlate of diversity and frequency of use of behavioral coping strategies. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that fall prevention practitioners and researchers should document the range and frequency of use of strategies that seniors may employ to cope with fear of falling. These data could help improve interventions and evaluative research in the domain of fall prevention.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".