Anxiety symptoms and coping strategies used by older adults during COVID-19: A national e-study of linkages among and between them
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A global pandemic is a hardly typical and anxiety-dampening event. Research in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic tells of associations between advancing age and anxiety dampening. The aim of this study was to further investigate this by examining and creating a blueprint of older Canadians' symptoms of pandemic-related anxiety and coping strategies, and linkages among and between them. A national e-survey was conducted in the second year of the pandemic with 1,327 older Canadians, when national public health measures lifted. Anxiety symptoms were measured using the Geriatric Anxiety Scale - 10. Participants also completed the Coping with Stress and Anxiety personal assessment tool. Network Analyses revealed a troubling trio of anxiety symptoms of central importance to our respondents: feelings of restlessness, muscle tension and having no control over their lives. Restless and no control over my life explained between 64-68% of the variance in 8 other anxiety symptoms. Coping seemed to occur through trial and error. Some strategies appeared to work in tandem and others in opposition to each other. Remembered resilience and staying active functioned as bridges shielding older people from worry, restlessness, and tension through spurning other remedial actions. This study provides evidence of a stable and predictable network of anxiety symptoms containing three particularly pernicious symptoms and the complex and arduous nature of mentally healthy recovery work. A visual representation of how anxiety symptoms can operate as a network might help older people better understand their own symptom experiences. Combining the two networks offers a blueprint of what within-person recovery might look like and a visual teaching tool for practitioners and program developers; older people could gain added insight into their own recovery experience.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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".