IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/geronb/v77y2022i4pe64-e69..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Resilience in Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Socioecological Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Heidi Igarashi
  • Maria L Kurth
  • Hye Soo Lee
  • Soyoung Choun
  • Dylan Lee
  • Carolyn M Aldwin

Abstract

ObjectivesWe examined sources of vulnerability and resilience among older adults early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.MethodsWe surveyed 235 respondents, 51–95 years old (M = 71.35; SD = 7.39; 74% female), including 2 open-ended questions concerning COVID-19-related difficulties and positive experiences during the past week. Using inductive coding, we found 9 final codes for difficulties and 12 for positives and grouped them into socioecological levels: personal, interpersonal, and societal.ResultsDifficulties were reported by 94% of the sample, while 63% described positives. Difficulties and positive responses were made at all socioecological levels and illustrated a dialectic between personal-level constraints and opportunities, interpersonal-level social isolation and integration, and societal-level outrage, sorrow, and social optimism.DiscussionRespondents described sources of vulnerabilities and resilience that supported a socioecological approach to understand resilience during this pandemic. A notable example was resilience derived from witnessing and contributing to the community and social solidarity, highlighting the potential of older adults as resources to their communities during the global pandemic.

Suggested Citation

  • Heidi Igarashi & Maria L Kurth & Hye Soo Lee & Soyoung Choun & Dylan Lee & Carolyn M Aldwin, 2022. "Resilience in Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Socioecological Approach," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 77(4), pages 64-69.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:77:y:2022:i:4:p:e64-e69.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbab058
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joanne Brooke & Maria Clark, 2020. "Older people’s early experience of household isolation and social distancing during COVID‐19," Journal of Clinical Nursing, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(21-22), pages 4387-4402, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Susanne Scheibe & Jessica De Bloom & Ton Modderman, 2022. "Resilience during Crisis and the Role of Age: Involuntary Telework during the COVID-19 Pandemic," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(3), pages 1-21, February.
    2. Magen Mhaka-Mutepfa & Sheila Shaibu, 2022. "Resilience: Key Factors Associated With Resilience of Older People in Botswana," SAGE Open, , vol. 12(3), pages 21582440221, September.
    3. Mark Brennan-Ing & Yiyi Wu & Jasmine A. Manalel & Ruth Finkelstein, 2023. "Taking Charge: Social Support Dynamics among Older Adults and Their Significant Others in COVID-19 Vaccination and Mitigation Efforts," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(6), pages 1-13, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yujie Zhang, 2023. "The role of victim sensitivity between anti-welfare dependence attitude and mental health of older adults in China," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-13, December.
    2. Sabrina Cipolletta & Francesca Gris, 2021. "Older People’s Lived Perspectives of Social Isolation during the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(22), pages 1-16, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:77:y:2022:i:4:p:e64-e69.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.