Introduction
Researchers, policymakers and community members have noted and debated reasons for the “paradox of wellbeing” (Swift et al., 2014) in ageing, that age-related changes in health, resources or circumstances may not simply prevent older people being able to sustain their subjective well-being. Contributors to this issue of our journal raise diverse approaches to engage with different aspects of this paradox while nonetheless raising further questions.
The novel approach taken by Serra and Silva investigated, with a cohort of 126 older people living in the community, whether effective cognitive functioning and life satisfaction can improve an individual’s subjective health and so better manage their health-related everyday activity challenges. This used assessment scores from Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Scale of Subjective Health Complaints and a Life Satisfaction Scale. This found cognitive functioning and life satisfaction as contributing to reducing subjective health complaints, which could inform designing interventions to promote both health and quality of life for older people.
Purrington’s systematic review has rigorously explored the psychological relationship between older adults’ perceptions of ageing and depression. This similarly found more negative attitudes towards ageing, whether one’s own or towards older others, again were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms. While this could not establish causal direction for this relationship, these findings may encourage more research to resolve the issue of causal direction.
An Argentinian study by Revollo et al. on perceptions of the elderly on using cell phones used a non-experimental, cross-sectional, correlational design, to explore, with a purposive sample of 138 older people, what perceptions of cell phone use may have shaped their behaviour. This reinforced gerontological theory and research findings that neurological and psychocognitive changes may not determine ageing trajectories so much as bio-environmental, experiential and cultural changes. This also perhaps helped understand some otherwise surprising findings such as older Argentinian women being more likely to be cell phone users, but this study found Argentinian men, rather, saw themselves as having greater self-efficacy, and positive attitudes to using cell phones.
The possibility for variations in older peoples’ and policymakers’ pandemic public responses taking local socio-cultural perceptions into account rather than limiting attention to disease trajectories can be seen in the UK cross-national contexts of voluntary action examined by Grotz et al. This aimed to critically examine the effects of COVID-19 social discourses and policy decisions on older adult volunteers in the UK. This identified how regional variation in the public health response to COVID-19 created different opportunities for older peoples’ volunteering in the four different UK nations. While the initial policy emphasis was placed on preventing disease transmission by limiting individual freedom, especially for many older people. However, as the pandemic progressed, specific differences around the efficacy of this public health response emerged across the UK.
Studies like these help dissolve the paradox of well-being for older people when they can be seen as more than physically and mentally ageing, but also as actively engaging with social, cultural and experiential factors which may in turn affect physical, emotional and psychological ageing trajectories.
