The Complexity of Mobility in Old Age: Six-Year Longitudinal Study of Elderly Suburbanites Growing Old at Home
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the results from a doctoral thesis in gerontology, planning, and architecture. This paper aims to understand residential trajectories, daily experiences, and meanings of home and of daily mobility for elderly suburbanites. This longitudinal study has been conducted in Canada, between 1999 and 2006. While studying elders’ residential aspirations has been prevalent in recent decades, little research has been conducted on actual residential behaviors. The first aim is to explore the evolution of elderly suburbanites’ residential aspirations trough a temporal perspective. The second aim is to understand the evolution of seniors’ daily mobility in both displacement and meanings issues. The third objective is to monitor the ties that bind residential and daily mobility. Residential Aspirations and Residential Choices: Postwar suburbs are problematic living areas for those elders who choose to age at home, which many studies have confirmed is the choice of a vast majority. They intend to go beyond day-to-day difficulties. The literature shows, through synchronic portraits, those suburban seniors adapt to their residential environment according to their autonomy level, financial and social resources, as well as meanings of home, neighborhood. This “well-known” desire to age in place has not been longitudinally monitored, with a few exceptions. Some studies suggest that the decision to move is multifaceted. Daily mobility is also at the basis of a new residential location choice. Methods' Triangulation: Recent research showed the “complexity” of both the aging process and the environment where individual experiences take place. By mixing quantitative, qualitative and spatial analyses, the transformation of practices and experiences of home and neighborhood have been explored through a complex layering of issues. Socio-anthropological interviews where used for data collection with a non-random sample. From the 1999 sample of 102 seniors, 91 were retraced in 2006 (70 in place and 15 moved), 6 are now deceased, and 11 could not be found. Growing older in suburb, an inevitable residential experiences modification: Results show that residential behaviors are consistent with residential aspirations. Furthermore, results show that we must investigate beyond the elders' health and emotional attachment to home in order to explain the everyday environmental tensions. Aging at home is more than a deliberate choice. With the inertia of time, the elders adapt their lifestyles to the environment without actually entering a decision process. Daily activities and mobility practices are continuously redesigned in order to age in place. Therefore, daily experiences’ adaptation to social interactions and the home representations all become sine qua none outcomes. The capacity of adaptation allows maintaining social contacts and positive home experiences.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".