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

Abstract

Age-related challenges and transitions can have considerable social, psychological, and physical consequences that may lead to significant changes in quality of life (QoL). As such, maintaining high levels of QoL in later life may crucially depend on the ability to demonstrate resilience (i.e., successful adaptation to late-life challenges). The current study set out to explore the interplay between several resilience factors, and how these contribute to the realization and maintenance of (different facets of) QoL. Based on the previous work, we identified behavioral coping, positive appraisal, self-management ability, and physical activity as key resilience factors. Their interplay with (various facets of) QoL, as measured with the WHOQOL-OLD, was established through network analysis. In a sample of community-dwelling older adults (55+; N=1,392), we found that QoL was most strongly (and directly) related to positive appraisal style and self-management ability. Among those, taking care of multifunctional resources (i.e., yielding various benefits at the same time) seemed to be crucial. It connected directly to “satisfaction with past, present, and future activities,” a key facet of QoL with strong interconnections to other QoL facets. Our analysis also identified resilience factor(s) with the potential to promote QoL when targeted by training, intervention, or other experimental manipulation. The appropriate set of resilience factors to manipulate may depend on the goal and/or facet of QoL that one aims to improve.

Normative and Psychometric Properties of the Whoqol Older Adults Module (Whoqol-Old) in the National Repository

“…The dimension scores obtained in this study were like the scores of the WHOQOL-OLD Turkish validation study (2) and were lower than the scores obtained in developed societies (12)(13)(14), whereas closer dimension scores were obtained with the other developing countries such as India, Iran, Brazil, and Mexico (15)(16)(17)(18). When we compared the dimension scores obtained from this study with the findings of the multicenter international development study published by Power et al (1), the mean dimension scores we obtained were lower than the scores obtained from the international study in all dimensions except the intimacy dimension, which is about the same as in the development study.…”

Quality of life during COVID-19 pandemic: a community-based study in Dakahlia governorate, Egypt

“…The findings demonstrated that the initial half of the data collection time yielded lower quality of life than the second half. Therefore, it could be suggested that people became increasingly resistant to the pandemic situation and restriction changes over time, possibly because they had coped with the pandemic-related events and got accustomed to the uncertainty and frequent policy changes [ 36 ]. Similarly, recent findings reported poor QoL in earlier waves of the pandemic compared to late pandemic, indicating that adapting to changes in daily life has reduced the anticipated impact on Qol over time [ 37 ].…”

Patterns of the physical, cognitive, and mental health status of older individuals in a real-life primary care setting and differences in coping styles

“…Another way is through educational programs aimed at fostering coping abilities and self-management skills ( 29 , 36 ). Implementation of the resilience theory in geriatric research, however, requires the use of more integrated measures of the aging process, to indicate functional abilities of older individuals, and more comprehensive methods of research, to represent the complex relationships among involving factors ( 37 , 38 ).…”