industry & reform
Over 80 not ‘ over the hill ’
New study looks at how we can make ageing more meaningful .
Tim Windsor interviewed by Conor Burke
Old age is not the end of a meaningful life . At a time when meaningful ageing is a buzz term in aged care , researchers say that remaining engaged with meaningful activities as we get older can help us achieve just that .
International experts led by Flinders University studied the day-to-day activities of 73 adults aged 89 years on average , and assessed whether older participants reported more positive emotions at times when they rated their activities as more personally meaningful .
“ In all , no matter what people chose , respondents expressed a strong emotional connection to activities which still present them with achievable challenges ,” says Flinders University Emeritus Professor Mary Luszcz , who has led the Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing .
One seniors ’ table tennis club in Adelaide has regular attendance from people mostly over 70 years old , with five males and 1 female over 80 .
The oldest member is 88 and in “ good shape ” says Rod Nankivell , who oversees the group who meet twice a week .
“ Enthusiasm is high with all our members , who have generally stayed with us once they start ,” he says .
“ Remaining engaged with meaningful activities as we get older is an important part of ageing well ,” says Flinders University Associate Professor Tim Windsor .
Windsor joined Aged Care Insite to discuss the study and how we can achieve meaningful ageing .
ACI : Tell us a bit about the study . TW : In this study we followed 73 older adults across the week , looking at their day-to-day activities . A couple of things that made it different to a lot of the research on older adults is that instead of just doing a one-off collection of information , we repeated our measures several times throughout the day , over consecutive days . So it gave us a bit more of a finegrained look at the day-to-day lives of older people .
The other thing that made this study a bit different is that this was a group of very old people . Our average age in the study was 89 , and participants were mostly in their late 80s and early 90s .
Even though there ’ s a lot of research done with older people , it often tends to be with those in their 60s and 70s , many
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It ’ s important for people in late life to be doing things that are important and meaningful to them , that help them to experience a sense of purpose .
of whom are still very fit , very healthy , and probably in many cases not that different to 40 and 50-year-olds . So it ’ s important to do research with that older age group , because they can sometimes be neglected , I think , in a lot of the research that ’ s done in gerontological circles .
You assessed whether older participants reported more positive emotions when they rated their activities as more meaningful to them . Tell us about that , and what were your other findings ? We did asked people to rate how meaningful their activities were , and then looked at their positive and negative emotions that they experienced during those times . We found there was this relationship where the quality of emotional experience tended to be higher when activities were rated as more meaningful .
It ’ s interesting though , that we also asked participants about how challenging their activities were . And we did see that the benefit of meaningful activity tended to drop off a little when activities were rated as more challenging .
We took that to mean that it ’ s important for people in late life to be doing things
12 agedcareinsite . com . au