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

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.

The Interplay between Quality of Life and Resilience Factors in Later Life: A Network Analysis

“…As such, SMA may play an important role in the reinforcing spirals (or feedback loops) among the resilience factors. This is in line with the idea that resilience should be represented as a combination of protective factors that do not function in isolation, but are interconnected and (potentially) strengthen one another (e.g., Brinkhof et al, 2021;Fritz et al, 2018Fritz et al, , 2019Scheffer et al, 2018).…”

“…Despite these limitations, the present study widens our understanding of the role of multiple resilience factors in predicting QoL as an outcome of resilience. Most fundamentally, our patterns of associations emphasize the complex and emergent nature of resilience (Brinkhof et al, 2021), showing that resilience in later life arises through interactions among several components, thereby impacting QoL jointly and possibly in a self-reinforcing way (Fritz et al, 2018(Fritz et al, , 2019Scheffer et al, 2018). This highlights the importance of investigating the role of resilience factors simultaneously (in complex systems), rather than individually.…”

“…In the current study, we build on the latter outcome-based perspective by focusing on the interplay between such factors in relation to QoL specifically. This approach acknowledges the complex and emergent nature of resilience (Brinkhof et al, 2021).…”

“…Data are derived from an ongoing large-scale online study on successful aging and resilience (Brinkhof et al, 2021), where participants complete an inventory including several questionnaires and tests that cover a multitude of relevant factors from multiple domains (e.g., physical, psychological, cognitive, social, environmental). Participants were eligible to enroll in this online inventory when they were 55 years or older, living in the Netherlands and had no Alzheimer's Disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia or other dementia diagnosis.…”

Data_Sheet_1.pdf

“…Data are derived from an ongoing large-scale online study on successful aging and resilience (Brinkhof et al, 2021; approved by the local ethics committee of the University of Amsterdam, 2020-DP-12556), where participants complete an inventory including several questionnaires and tests that cover a multitude of relevant factors from multiple domains (e.g., physical, psychological, cognitive, social, and environmental). It took approximately 1-1.5 h to complete the entire inventory, but participation could be divided over several days.…”