Assessing social connection for long‐term care home residents: A scoping review of measure content
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Social connection comprises distinct but interrelated aspects describing how individuals connect to each other. Various measures have assessed multiple aspects of social connection in long-term care (LTC) home populations, but they use inconsistent terminology, making it unclear what aspects are measured. This scoping review describes how social connection is assessed by measures that have been used in LTC home residents. METHODS: This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. Two systematic literature searches combining search terms for social connection AND LTC home residents AND measurement properties were conducted in eight electronic databases from inception to April 2022. Included studies reported the development or psychometric testing of measures which assessed social connection in LTC home residents. A content analysis with a deductive-inductive approach was used to analyze the measures' content and an adapted Framework Method was used for data management. Findings report each measure's items and the assessed aspects of social connection. Dementia and non-dementia-specific measures had content, administration, and scoring compared. RESULTS: From 8753 records, 58 studies reporting on 14 dementia-specific and 28 non-dementia-specific social connection measures were identified, including complete measures, subscales, and single items. These measures assessed social network (52.4%), social isolation (11.9%), social interaction (47.6%), social engagement (31.0%), social support (33.3%), social connectedness (21.4%), and loneliness (9.5%). A total of 27 (64.3%) of the measures included more than one aspect of social connection. Dementia-specific measures most often assessed social interaction whereas non-dementia-specific measures most often assessed social network, social interaction, and social support. Dementia-specific measures typically relied on a proxy response, whereas non-dementia-specific measures more often used self-report. DISCUSSION: Existing social connection measures in LTC home settings operationalize seven aspects of social connection and differ according to the target population (dementia or non-dementia-specific). These findings will inform future measure selection and development. Highlights: Social connection is important to long-term care (LTC) home residents' quality of life.Social connection has been assessed by quantifying/describing relationships.Existing measures usually assess more than one aspect of social connection.These aspects cover several interlinked observed or experienced domains.Dementia and non-dementia-specific measures differ in assessing social connection.
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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 | 0.049 | 0.166 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.030 | 0.027 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".