Older adults’ experiences of maintaining social participation: Creating opportunities and striving to adapt to changing situations

Abstract

Background: Social participation concerns the possibility of engaging in activities in interaction with others or society at large and contributes to the health and well-being of older adults. In contrast, a lack of social participation is associated with loneliness. It is, therefore, important to understand what strategies older adults use to maintain social participation. Aim: To explore and describe older adults' experiences of maintaining social participation. Materials and methods: Nine older adults, aged 69-92 years, participated in interviews that were analysed through qualitative content analysis. Results: The overall findings reflect how older adults create opportunities for social participation by developing strategies and striving to adapt to changing situations, emphasizing how maintaining social participation is an active process. Preserving social participation requires motivation and an effort to take initiative to cultivate social relations, maintain community bonds, engage in social events and activities and stay connected with society. Conclusions and significance: These results may extend our understanding of strategies that older adults use, as well as the challenges they face when striving to adapt to new circumstances. This study may have implications for the practice of how to support older adults' social participation.

Older Adults’ Experiences of Using Strategies to Maintain and Foster Social Participation: A Systematic Review with Metasynthesis of Qualitative Studies

“…As described in the main theme, older adults routinely use strategies to manage their mindset and feelings. Tese conscious strategies involved having a positive outlook where the older adults motivated themselves to social participation by actively practicing gratefulness even with declining health, in challenging situations, or when feeling discouraged [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. It was also described that many others were "worse of" [40,43] or they compared their current situation with earlier experiences of managing worse life situations [42,44].…”

“…It was also described that many others were "worse of" [40,43] or they compared their current situation with earlier experiences of managing worse life situations [42,44]. Tis mindset managing resulted in an inner drive to persist with participation, pushing the older adults forward in pursuing activities with others [34,36,[38][39][40][41][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. Te inner drive to stay an active and participating member of one's family, community, neighborhood, or society was considered essential in fostering social participation [34,36,38,39,41,42,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50]52].…”

“…Te inner drive to maintain active and social participation was described as a conscious choice [35-38, 40, 41, 44-47, 49, 50] motivated and fueled by a positive outlook [34,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. However, in several studies, it was also recognized that to uphold a positive outlook, one needed to accept one's situation and come to terms with declining abilities to be able to make use of realistic opportunities [34,38,43,44,47].…”

“…However, in several studies, it was also recognized that to uphold a positive outlook, one needed to accept one's situation and come to terms with declining abilities to be able to make use of realistic opportunities [34,38,43,44,47]. Tis process was not always easy or linear, meaning that the older adults had also developed strategies for consciously choosing to foster social participation [36, 38, 40, 41, 44-47, 49, 50] by regulating their emotions to reach acceptance [40,49] and to remain positive [38,39,41,43,46]. Tis regulation could mean that the older adults from time to time needed to have delimited outlets of negative emotions.…”

Experiences of Active Everyday Life Among Persons with Prodromal Alzheimer’s Disease: A Qualitative Study

“…7 Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic has shed light on the myriad of ways changes to activity quality impact well-being and quality of life as important as the participation quantity. [10][11][12] The aim of this study was to explore and describe the active everyday lives of persons with prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD) in terms of quality of participation in activities and perceived restrictions. We drew on the World Health Organization's Active Ageing Policy to conceptualize "active lifestyle" as synonymous with active aging, which refers to "the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation, and security in order to enhance the quality of life as people age".…”