The Future of Age-Friendly: Building a More Inclusive Model Using Principles of Ecology and Social Capital

Abstract

ABSTRACT Menec's (2011) framework for understanding age-friendly efforts rests on two ideas: first, that we need to take an ecological approach to develop these programs; second, that social connectedness forms the core of what makes a program age-friendly. Building on previous research in which we demonstrated the association between social connectedness and the health outcomes that are often the goals of age-friendly efforts, we added an environmental measure in order to determine if using an ecological approach improves our understanding of the relation of social connectedness to health outcomes. We discovered that the added measure does strengthen our model.