Factors that affect successful aging through different decades of older adulthood: A qualitative approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context: Qualitatively derived, lay-based definitions have provided socially relevant conceptualizations of successful aging, however, limited knowledge exists as to how such conceptualizations change throughout older adulthood. Purpose: To qualitatively examine the factors that contribute to successful aging during different decades of older adulthood. Methods: Fundamental qualitative description was adopted as the methodological framework. Through purposeful sampling, 42 community dwelling older adults (mean age = 79.6 years, age range = 65-97 years; 19 males) were recruited. Focus groups (6) segmented by decade of life were conducted with participants 65-74 (n = 17) and 75-84 (n = 17) years of age. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four participants from each decade, as well as participants 85 years of age and older (n = 8). Data analyses were conducted independently for each decade of life and included inductive analysis of textual data through continuous comparisons of meaning units. Results: Three primary themes related to successful aging were identified across all decades of older adulthood: (1) staying healthy (subthemes: genetics and life style choices ), (2) maintaining an active engagement in life (subthemes: social engagement and cognitive engagement ), and (3) keeping a positive attitude . Participants in specific decades of older adulthood identified three additional subthemes related to maintaining an active engagement in life : finances (65-74 and 85+ years), social support (75+ years), and successful marriage (75+ years). Similarly, only adults 65-84 years of age identified a subtheme for keeping a positive attitude: acceptance and adaptation to life . Discussion: Primary themes related to successful aging were agreed upon by participants in all decades of older adulthood, while age-based differences existed among subthemes. Thus, what it means to age successfully may be age-dependent. Acknowledgments: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".