Fear of falling : the experience of elderly individuals who have previously fallen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fear of falling resulting from a previous fall has serious health implications for elderly individuals who live in the community. This fear has been linked to activity restriction, poor physical health, increased dependence, and lifestyle changes. Previous research on fear of falling has described it in relation to other outcomes of a fall and not as a discrete entity. None of the studies included the individual's perspective. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to describe the meaning of the experience of fear of falling from the perspective's of elderly individuals who have previously fallen. The phenomenological method was used to gain an understanding of the subjective experience of the nine elderly community-dwelling individuals who participated in the study. All of the participants had fallen more than once and all had sustained an injury from a fall. In the course of two or three interviews, each participant and the researcher constructed an account of the participant's experience of the fear of falling. Using content analysis the data was conceptualized into themes and concepts reflective of the participants' perspectives. The presentation of this descriptive data was organized into two major themes which represented a process of adjustment: making meaning of the experience of the fear of falling and integrating the meaning of the experience into daily living. The findings revealed that fear of falling threatened the individual's physical and psychological survival. In response a process of adjustment was initiated in which the individual used behavioural and cognitive activities that sought to maintain control and were self-enhancing. The participants' accounts of their fear of falling highlight the importance of determining the client's perspective in order to understand and work with elderly individuals who fall and are afraid of falling again. In light of the research findings implications for nursing practice, nursing education, and nursing research are discussed.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".