A Network Perspective on Successful Aging and Resilience in Later Life: A Protocol Paper release_2mc7ouoftjddhouvvzfy7yu77a

Abstract

Aging inevitably gives rise to many late-life challenges and transitions that impose threats for one's physical and mental health, which can greatly impact our well-being and quality of life. Hence, the key to successful aging may not be the absence of these challenges and transitions, but the ability to demonstrate resilience to them. We recently started a large-scale study (N > 10.000) among older adults (55 years or older) in the Netherlands, with the aim to understand resilience as an emergent property that arises through the interplay between various (risk and protective) factors from different domains. Participants are asked to complete online questionnaires and tests that cover a multitude of relevant factors from multiple domains (e.g., physical, psychological, cognitive, social, environmental). Relationships between those factors will be analysed through network analysis, in which conditional dependencies between factors are depicted in a network of nodes. In this way, critical resilience (protective) and risk factors can be identified. This study offers a unique possibility to obtain insights into the factors that characterize and contribute to resilience in old age and thereby assist in generating hypotheses for follow up work. The contribution of this study in the growing field of resilience research, as well as the limitations, are discussed accordingly.
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