The multi-dimensions of social participation of older adults in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong is one of the places facing population aging, despite the Hong Kong Government has been devoting resources on fostering the quality of life or well-being for the older adults, individual efforts also constituted paramount influences on it. Social participation has been addressed as one of the key components across differential aging concepts. Nevertheless, social participation seemed to be a common construct that appeared in both subjective and objective definitions among these aging concepts. Consistent findings showed that higher social participation could be beneficial to older adults in various aspects including physical development, psychological well-being as well as cognitive preservation. Meanwhile, there has been a lack of consensus and measurement of social participation in gerontological field. The present study used the taxonomy of activity types to conceptualize social participation. One common way to understand about the overview of how older adults participate in specific kind of activities is to carry out the cluster analysis. This could be effective to categorize a population into sub-groups according to their participation rate in various activity types. Moreover, it is also possible to investigate the relationships between activity types and psychological well-being. Once the relationships were established, other significant associated relationships could be further investigated by considering the potential mediators including structural social support and functional social support. To achieve this aim, Study 1a and 1b adopted a cross-sectional study design. Study 1a investigated the social activity profiles of Hong Kong older adults. Subsequent analyses were performed to investigate the differences in socio-demographic variables, other social determinants as well as life satisfaction among clusters. Study 1b testified the possible mechanisms on how different social activity types contributed to life satisfaction through other social determinants among older adults. Data were collected from community centers or non-governmental organizations within 1 year using convenience and snowball sampling in accordance with another aging project launched by The Hong Kong Jockey Club. A total of 719 respondents were included for Study 1, they completed a set of questionnaire originally capturing perception of age-friendly city, the targeted variables for the present study were included followed by it, which included socio-demographic variables, social participation frequency, social network members and its contact frequency, functional social support from social network members and life satisfaction. Study 1a categorized two sub-groups of older adults in Hong Kong, namely, socially-active group (n = 320) and socially-less-active group (n = 399). Despite that socially-active older adults were more educated and reported better health status, they possessed more social members in their social circle and reported greater average contact frequency with them. They also perceived themselves with better social support, and most importantly, with better life satisfaction which was considered as the well-being indicator of successful agers. Thus, the key idea of Study 1a is that old adults with greater social participation should tend to have more benefits including more social recourses for social support and perceived better on evaluation of their life status. Study 1b extended the investigation by taking the same samples for data analysis. Results indicated that not all activity types were associated with life satisfaction among Hong Kong older adults. Activity types including physical activities, recreational activities and voluntary work were found to be associated with life satisfaction. However, these relationships were partially serially mediated by social network size and functional social support or solely mediated by functional social support. Another activity of contacting others through technology was not directly associated with life satisfaction, but the relationship was also fully serially mediated by social network size and functional social support or solely by functional social support. For cultural activities, only functional social support fully mediated the relationship. Study 1b highlighted the importance of some key activity types and the possible mechanisms of how these activities contributed to life satisfaction through other social determinants among Hong Kong older adults. Furthermore, the role of functional social support has been emphasized and believed to be a more proximal factor to psychological well-being among the Hong Kong older adults as suggested in the literature. Negative age stereotypes have been considered as one of the negative factors influencing various dimensions of well-being of older adults. Study 2 replicated and extended the investigation on how negative age stereotype priming could affect various processes of memory performance using an implicit priming task among older adults in Hong Kong. 105 participants were recruited for the experiment. Participants were primed either with negative age stereotype primes or neutral words by an implicit priming task which was framed as a reaction task prior to the episodic memory task. Results indicated that experimental group performed significantly worse than the control group among all measures in the memory performances. Follow-up analyses showed that social participation moderated the effects of negative age stereotype primes in the recognition task. Social participation, measured by average frequency of activity types, was found to be a potential moderator on this effect. The initial empirical findings suggested that social participation might act as an effective strategy against negative age stereotype primes. Socially-active older adults might possess few negative age stereotypes so that the effect on activation of those negative age stereotypes was weakened. Two studies established that social participation of older adults not just provide positive impacts on their well-being, it might also act as a protective factor that prevent the negative effects induced by age stereotypes. Recommendations for how to enhance social participation among older adults were discussed.