Older adults’ resilience in rural places: Explaining the role of place, time, and social connection during COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Older adults and their communities can be resilient, yet deficit-based portrayals of older adults living in rural communities remain common in research and public discourses. Drawing from contemporary research on aging, rural communities, and social connection, we explored rural older adults' resources and resilience processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. This longitudinal, case study research included 66 qualitative interviews with 22 older adults at three different points in time between May 2020 and June 2021 in rural Manitoba, Canada. Findings highlighted that even during this adverse time, many older adults experienced well-being in this study, demonstrating resilience. Explaining their experiences, participants described adopting new technologies and using long-established strategies to maintain important social relationships during periods of isolation. Participants social connections varied, with some experiencing lessening of loneliness over time. Some older adults resisted public health restrictions and developed their own mitigation strategies for safe gatherings while a loss of community spaces contributed to some participants' experiences of chronic loneliness and low levels of well-being. Purposeful community activities (especially volunteering), access to the outdoors, and access to essential community spaces (e.g., grocers and post-offices) were described as important strategies and resources at the local level. By describing rural older adults’ valued resources and resource gaps with attention to both place and time this study contributes to the growing body of research in relation to social connection and resilience and advances resilience theoretical approaches to the study of rural aging. • Research on older adults' resilience needs to be attentive to the role of place, time, and social connections. • Relationships, spaces, technologies, and activities are needed to support social connection and well-being. • All rural older adults developed strategies to cope with adversity, but they had uneven access to resources. • Community resources and programs are critical to providing access to resources.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".