>> Erica Moore: Hello and welcome to today's Office
of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research webinar
titled Residential Age Stratification: Effects on
Older Adults' Well-Being.
I'm Erica Moore, Communications Director of
OBSSR, and I will be today's moderator.
On behalf of OBSSR, I would like to thank you
all for attending today's session.
The agenda for today's webinar is simple.
In a moment, I will introduce today's speaker
Dr. Sara Moorman who will present on a project that
supposes the age composition of
neighborhoods is a key contributor to health and
well-being in mid and later life.
The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session
in which we will answer your questions.
Joining me and Dr. Moorman to answer your questions
is Dr. Bill Elwood, Health Science Administrator
at OBSSR.
Before we begin, here are a few
logistical announcements.
So, just advance to the next slide please.
Today's webinar is being recorded.
All phone lines will be muted during the webinar.
Questions and comments will not be taken via
phone but will be taken via the Q&A feature
located at the top right corner of your screen.
You can ask a question at any time.
To ask the question or send us a comment, click
on Q&A at the top right corner of your screen,
select "ask all panelists," type in your
question, and hit send.
We will try to answer as many questions as we can.
In the interest of time and to make sure we take
as many questions as time permits, we will take a
single question at a time from any one participant.
Now to introduce today's speaker, Sara Moorman, PhD
is an associate professor of sociology at Boston
College where she holds a joint appointment with
the Institute on Aging.
She has been at Boston College since 2009 when
she completed her PhD in sociology at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She is a fellow and a member of the editorial
board of the Journal of Research on Aging.
Moorman's other major line of research investigates
decision-making at the end of life with attention
to family relationship quality.
She is currently beginning new research on mild
cognitive impairment as a function of
risk originating in adolescence.
I am now turning the webinar over to
Dr. Moorman who will now begin her presentation.
>> Sara Moorman: Thank you.
So, as Erica said, my presentation title is
Residential Age Stratification: Effects on
Older Adults' Well-Being and sociologists, as I am
one of, typically study disparity or inequality by
factors such as race, class, and gender, which
are sort of our holy triumvirate.
And in this project, I'm looking at
health disparity by age.
Age is the lesser-addressed category
relative to gender because selecting people whose
through age categories overtime or as their
socioeconomic mobility is less and gender,
racial mobility is very little at all.
And secondly because, although always keeping
vulnerable, most people prefer being in the
vulnerable position to being in the
dead condition which is being raw.
So, fewer people look at age as a social
stratifier in society.
Now when I say age segregation, I'm here
talking about segregation strictly in sense of
isolation or separation without necessarily buying
any kind of connotation to it positive or negative yet.
We'll get there later.
So, scholars such as Hagestad and Uhlenberg
talked about three different types
of age segregation.
One is institutional where age is a criterion
for admittance.
Some things like your birth date has to fall on
a certain time in order for you to
begin kindergarten.
And your birthday has to fall at a certain time in
order for you to be eligible for
social security benefits and so on.
Cultural age segregation is the extent to which age
is a marker of lifestyle.
So, if you think about the last album you bought and
compare it across people of different ages,
probably find differences there.
And the third way, and the one that I'll be talking
about the most today is spacial age segregation,
where age is a determinant of where people spend
time, where they have their physical location.
So, going back to the album example, or you
think about going to concerts by those artists,
those are age segregated spaces.
Or if you were to think about the institutions
such as kindergarten which are also age
segregated spaces.
Another example I like to give my students
is a grocery store.
Everybody goes to the grocery store, right?
But people go to the grocery store at different
times of the day and different times of the
week depending on age.
So, I have to think about going to the grocery
store at 9:00 a.m.
on a Friday versus who's at the grocery store at
5 o'clock on Friday.
So, theoretically, we affect age integration,
that is the opposite of the segregation that I was
just describing, to be good for the
health of older adults.
Because we expect that that age integration will
sort out social isolation.
That age integration will allow over develops to
talk with technology via change in culture and so on.
They also expect age integration, theoretically
speaking, to be good for the health of children
because more interaction with older people, adults,
and older adults meaning more mentors, more
teachers, more contact, more support.
And therefore, the theorists who talk about
age integration who include Matilda White
Riley, sort of came to conclude that age
integration should be theoretically good for
just about everybody.
However, empirically, there's a big black box.
Although a variety of series to talk about the
health benefits in age integrations, inherently,
it's been very little tested.
There are some European data on social networks.
So, taking a social roster and saying, okay, who are
the people who are most important to you, whose
closest to you, meaning that the most contact with
and then asking the ages of those people.
And in European data, we found that networks are
highly age segregated with family ties being
almost the only inter-generational ties
that people have.
So, if for example you're a 75-year-old woman and
you list an important social contact who's under
the age of 35, that person's probably
a family member.
We don't, or at least didn't when I started this
project, have this kind of data in the end stage.
That's how the [unintelligible] of the
first few ways of the National Health and Aging
trends study, we do have one study that has social
networks data with ages.
When I started this project, we didn't.
What we had was administrative data
on spatial age segregation.
Specifically, we have this census.
And the most recent census is the 2010 census which
covered every American household with the
10-question form that included their age and
then aggregated that information
to various different geographical contexts.
Where the ones with neighborhood researchers
knew tended to be the census tract, which is a
subdivision of a county, they're always nested
within counties and the tracts are designed to be
relatively homogeneous with respect to
demographics, economics, living conditions.
And they're all supposed to be approximately
4,000 residents.
Which means that census tracts are physically
bigger in less populous parts of the country, like
plains area, Great Plains area, and they're
smaller in cities.
So, for example, this is the census tract
we're in talks to and from right now.
And in context of this particular census track
right now is that it's very walkable to go from
east to west and it's just a half hour walk.
And it has boundaries that people recognize widely
as being neighborhood boundaries.
So, to the north, Commonwealth Avenue, to
the south, the D line
is the green line, [unintelligible].
So, it's a pretty well-defined
neighborhood space.
It does have a census tract and weaknesses
are shown in this.
To give you an example, one of it bisects campus,
so actually, I said it I'm in the center of tract,
but I'm actually a little bit to the left of that
far line because the Boston Newton T line is
part of that campus and as that tract rests within
larger units, like we've said before.
Another thing, this particular census tract is
not so socioeconomically homogenous.
Up on campus, we've got some college students
living in the dorms.
Over here by the reservoir, Big Poppy has a
condo and I've seen pictures of it and it's
not much like a dorm.
So, what will be done for census tract and other
census unit analysis from prior research, shows that
each segregation is comparable and spoke to
the neighborhood integration of Hispanic
persons in the United States.
This is where probably Michelle McLaren [phonetic
sp] and some of her colleagues and she found
that at the county level 43 percent of people who
need to move, to change neighborhoods, in order
to evenly distribute people by age.
So, what I did in this project was I started out
with the age distribution of the United States.
So, for instance in the US as a whole, 18.5 percent
of people are aged sixty or older.
And so, this is also true for, you know, the
percentages of people in different age groups
typically 18 to 24, 24 to 34, so on.
And so, we looked at the distribution by age group
and said, okay, there will be the standards in which
we're going to call these neighborhoods
representatives and non-representatives.
And I'll show you some slides later in which I
picked plus minus one or two percent and for most
of this research I picked plus or minus five percent.
So, I'm saying that a neighborhood is
representative of ages of people 60 and older is,
within that census tract, between 13.5 percent to
23.5 percent of people, residents, are older adults.
So, let's look at this next slide.
Categorized two different types of neighborhoods.
One of these neighborhoods that are age
representative where it has between 13.5 and 23.5
percent of older adults plus representation within
plus or minus 5 percent of younger adults, and what
my students and I have been calling family.
Which is adults aged 30 to 49 and to deal with little
children aged 18 and under
especially created this typology.
Where about a sort of people live in age
representative census tracts, there is a
chunk of people that live in that tract that
over-represent families which is that 18.8 percent
are the neighborhoods that have more than you would
expect, more than 5 percent above the national
distribution of persons aged 30 to 45
and their children.
Then there's a chunk of neighborhoods
that over-represent young adults.
Those are adults aged 18-24.
And there's a good chunk, almost a quarter of
neighborhoods that will represent older adults,
people aged 60 plus.
And then there's about 10 percent of neighborhoods
that can't quite be evenly categorized.
They are normally distributed.
They're not evenly distributed but they're
also not quite easily identifiable either.
So, let me show you a couple of maps, and keep
in mind that these maps are definitely not to scale.
I showed you how off the census tracts were.
So, these maps -- these dots are many, many times
too big, but they can give you a kind of a sense of
the distribution of neighborhoods across
the United States.
So, you will see a very small number of
red dots in the US.
There's only 88 of them.
And those are dots that are within plus/minus 1
percent of the long 48 states of age distribution
or all the different age groups.
So, these are
highly under-represented neighborhoods.
And they don't have much of a spatial pattern.
However, if you look at the blue dots which are
neighborhoods within plus or minus 2 percent of the
lower 48 state age distribution for all the
age groups, you see some more clustering.
So, midwest, south-east, north-east,
California, west coast.
But fewer dots within the middle of the country.
This is another map of extremely age segregated
tracts where the red dots are neighborhoods that are
75 percent or more people aged 18 to 24.
So, those are pretty classic college
neighborhoods and you can see the constant on there,
College of Virginia, and Ann Arbor, Michigan and so on.
The blue dots are neighborhoods that are 75
percent or more family.
Again, those were adults aged 30 to 45 and their kids.
And so, you see those on the cluster in Texas,
there's one in Utah, so on.
And finding the green dots are our census tracts that
are 75 percent or more for persons aged 60 and older
and you see that those are distributed across
the sunbelt.
So, California, Arizona, Texas, and
particularly Florida.
So, that was our first step was to describe the
US in terms of age distribution and
spatial segregation.
But it's really only interesting insofar as the
distribution means something for
people's well-being.
So, let's move on to the second question of does
neighborhood age segregation matter for
health and well-being?
And here we have to change in literature
approaches of what could [unintelligible].
So, my hypothesis here, going into the project, is
the neighborhood age segregation would in fact
contribute to the health and well-being of
residents of all ages.
And why?
Because how does [unintelligible], Wiley,
and other theorists have said is that each
segregation changes the nature of social
interactions people have with the person around them.
Whether that is in the grocery store or the
neighborhood or at a concert or where have you.
And I don't want to point out that this hypothesis
doesn't specify direction and I don't think that
exactly the direction it should take is obvious.
The theorists say that age segregation should be bad
and age integration should be good for health
and well-being.
But, we also know things like retired communities
are extremely popular.
So, a couple [unintelligible]: number
one, when I showed you the extremely age segregated
tracts and how those tracts are 75 percent more
older people, those are places where people retire
there have more time.
So, to defend that people do choose age integration
I think it's an open question for age
segregation are.
I mean it's an open question whether
segregation integration be good or bad.
Which I think the thing that's interesting about
this research questions insofar as a lot of
the research is pretty directional.
If you're studying socioeconomic status, if
you're studying social disorders, you have a
pretty good idea that social disorders' going to
be bad, perhaps, and other kinds of outcomes.
So, this question is interesting to me because
it could very well [unintelligible].
We mentioned a little about how neighborhood
as a social context.
We know that older adults spend three quarters
of the day within their neighborhoods.
Now some of that may be in their houses or sleeping
and not interacting with neighbors.
But, we also know that older adults have the
highest levels of socialization with
neighbors and involvement in community activities.
So, older people are heavily -- should be
heavily influenced by what social interaction
they have in their neighborhoods.
And my research team and I got to think about what
kind of interaction could possibly happen.
One kind is that it could be negative interactions.
You could have what we call "daily
discrimination," or some people would
call it microaggressions.
But kind of low-level.
The question deals with things like how often
you're treated with less respect than other people,
and how often do people act as if you're not smart.
So, we're not talking about physical aggression,
we're not talking about high levels of
discrimination, such as being fired from a job.
But we're talking about sort of everyday irritants
that make you feel less about yourself.
So, that could be one possibility.
Another possibility is opportunity for
generativity which is a concept we talk a lot
about in gerontology where older adults have the
opportunity to teach, mentor, guide younger persons.
And here we're talking about younger persons of
all types, children for sure.
But people in other generations,
generally speaking.
And finally, another possible outcome of
interaction could be social integration to the
extent to which neighbors trust each other, feel
safe in the neighborhood, and feel like it's a
community and so on.
So, we said okay those are the three possible things
that could happen.
And we did accordingly two studies.
In the first time, we looked specifically at
daily age discrimination.
And I said that census doesn't measure health.
So, what we did here was we geo-matched census data
on age distribution and took a couple of other
measures such as racial and ethnic distribution
and socioeconomic distribution.
And that's that data to representative survey data
from the national survey of mid-life development in
the United States.
Specifically, we used wave two which was 2004 to 2006.
And in that study for this particular analysis, we
took the participants or residents in age of 60 or
older, of which there are a little over 1,500 of
them and they were living in a little bit under
1,500 census tracts.
So, it was a small amount of nesting there.
Our outcome was daily discrimination, so those
questions I read to you or plus others about
respect and so on.
And these are people who said that at least among
the reasons that this happened to them
was their age.
And finally, our key independent measure was
the percentage of tract residents who were
aged 60 or older.
Now in the next stage, I will be using the typical
topology that I showed you earlier.
But here we're using percentages census tract
in linear fashion because I'm going off the group
density theory which is a theory borrowed from the
race/ethnic literature.
The premise here is that despite the concentration
of the disadvantages of the status, such as
material hardship and isolation that are created
by residential segregation.
Also, the case that on those single residents
such as people of similar age could also entail
certain advantages.
So, for example older persons who live among
other older person should be protected for
exposure against age discrimination.
Because older people clearly aren't going to
discriminate against each other.
Whereas those being surrounded by younger
people might open older people up to possibility
of age discrimination.
We should mention that in this talk I'm going to
skip over many of my logical details such as
what controls I used and what modeling strategies
that I used here, but I'd be happy to take
questions about that.
So, these are our results from the first study which
did in fact show support for the density theory
particularly among people in their sixties.
So, you see that among people aged 60 and older
lived among a low proportion of older adults
where a low proportion of older adults is two points
below the median, have a 50 percent chance of
experiencing age discrimination at
the age of 60.
Whereas 60-year-olds who lived among the high
proportion of other older adults, and that's two
deviations above the mean, had only a 15 percent
chance of experiencing age discrimination.
And people who lived in an average type of
neighborhood had about a 30 percent chance.
And then you see that three lines converge, such
that by the time you're about 77 it doesn't matter
what your neighborhood context is at all.
You are equally likely, or rather unlikely, little
over 20 percent chance, of experiencing
age discrimination.
Now I'm not sure which one of the reasons it is, but
I have three possible reasons why this could be.
It could be that people perceived less age
discrimination as they get older.
So, we know that there's various causes of changes
such that older people turn into positivity-bias.
They pay more attention, they tend to be positive
or they tend to be less negative, which is
very good for emotional stability.
But it's maybe not so good for your reporting of
objectives in age discrimination.
Although it could be and this is the second
possibility that people really truly encounter
less age discrimination as they get older.
We know from the social activity theory and the
empirical work behind that that people trim their
social networks and get rid of irritating social ties.
So, it may be that people are able to protect
themselves from age discrimination
in various ways.
The third possibility that it could be
is selection effect.
It could be that the people who experience age
discrimination dropped out of my sample either
through death or refusal to participate
in the later stage.
So, that also is a possibility.
In the second study, we did a complicated path
model that includes the three possible types of
interactions I talked about before,
generativity, discrimination, and social
integration and mediating on the association between
neighborhood types and multiple outcomes.
So, here is where you take the advice that is
representative of all age groups, over-represents
older adults, over-represents young adults.
There's a category of few young adults.
There's a category of simply other and these are
all with reference to neighborhoods that
over-represent families, again the adults who are
30 to 49 and their children.
And here again, I do match the census data
to confirm bias.
But here I use the entire breadth of ages in the
sample which is 30 to 84 age group.
And so, there's 4,000 participants in the study
who are within about 3,700 census tracts.
I told you about new typology as far as the
dependent measures, we used the 43 item Ryff
scale, psychological well-being which includes
dimensions such as self-acceptance, autonomy,
personal growth, and personal control.
And I use the same standards so we can
measure self-reported health skills such as
excellent, very good, good, poor, very poor.
So, we're measuring the mediators such as
the generativity scale six items.
The nine-item daily discrimination which I
believe wanted that.
And the three items scale of social integration all
of which have had which lie upon reliability.
In terms of self-reported health, there are
three significant indirect effects.
So, first by neighborhoods where people could
experience generativity and places where
people could experience generativity in terms of
spaces where people had better self-reported health.
And I should note here that this is people of all
ages in that 30 to 84 range.
So, we're not strictly talking about generativity
among older adults only and this effect is either
limited to older adults.
And the second survey indirect effects were of
that relative to family neighborhood,
representative neighborhoods and
neighborhoods that over-represented older
people, the neighborhoods who had the highest levels
of social integration and social integration was in
turn associated with better self-reported health.
And I think this one is interesting because on the
simple principle of age segregation, within the
neighborhoods that over-represented older
adults compared to the neighborhoods who tested
lower self-reported health just because we have an
accumulation of people in poor health.
So, the fact that the image is associated in
actively the other direction is -- I think
it's really interesting.
So, here are the results with regard to
psychological well-being.
First, relative to neighborhoods that
over-represent families age representation in
places where people had experienced more
generativity and prospects of psychological
well-being and again in representative
neighborhoods and neighborhoods that
over-represented older adults, there are higher
levels of social integration and higher for
psychological well-being.
So, for this study if you look at that age structure
of the neighborhood is related two types of
social interaction people have with their neighbors.
Particularly in terms of generativity and social
interaction or social integration, sorry.
And these day-to-day interactions in the
neighborhood are in turn associated with
health and well-being.
There's a few limitations I should mention here, one
I introduced earlier for which in the extent to
which neighborhoods -- well, the extent of which
census tracks are not a good representation of
experiencing neighborhoods.
Second point is that the MIDUS data were collected
on averages in 2005, they were collected between
2004 and 2006, where the national census
data from 2010.
So, in parts of the country where population
change is rapid, the census figures might not
match up very well with the minus responses.
A certain area that cross-section data limits
casual claims and of course limits the extent
to which I can talk about things like moving.
That is why when people choose a retirement
community, would it be actively to get away from
age discrimination or some sort of interaction like
that, I cannot tell.
And honestly, they have relatively limited
nesting of individuals within tracts.
So, there's little leverage on the
neighborhood context whereas a study of a
few cities might tell you more.
In terms of implications, we have some for theory
practice and policy.
In terms of theory, I think, there is an open
question about whether, in some contexts, spatial age
segregation is good for people's health
and well-being.
So, in the age density paper, I found that people
were less likely experience age
discrimination in nested districts.
I also found that in highly age dense
neighborhoods, people have more social integration,
as well as examining the neighborhoods.
So, I think it's an open question and that there
might be cases in which age segregation is
valuable and important for people.
I think that conclusion of practice has to do with
whether interventions can alter the types of
inter-generational interactions people have
in age segregated neighborhoods.
So, we know again from [unintelligible]
literature that when people from diverse racial
and ethnic groups are brought together to
collaborate on a project in which they have shared
interests and they can both bring things to the
table and interact on an even playing field, that
interactions of that type, or interaction
that decrease stereotypes and racism.
And so presumably, inter-generational
interactions model the same sorts of principles
that is the shared interest in activity on
both tables bring things to the table and so on,
would permit age barriers to break down.
And given the interests of the community has in
pairing retirement centers with kindergartens and
schools and childcare centers and any kind of
interaction like that, I think that has
implications from the way those programs are
designed and administered.
And finally, policy, I think there's an open
question about whether public health policy
should work to promote aging in place which is
staying in the neighborhood in which
you've lived your adult life and in the community.
Or aging within non-retirement communities
that have, you know, physical safety features,
universal design, and so on.
I think that many communities see older
adults as a liability insurance in terms of too
many safety things like sidewalks, curbs,
shoveling snow, and also in terms of healthy
sources that older people frequently need versus
seeing older adults are a resource, where here I've
shown that how much younger adults actively
increases social integration and neighborhoods.
So, I think the neighborhood communities
can think about -- can move away from thinking
about the deficit perspective on
older adult residents.
So, those were my research publications and I am
very happy to answer your questions.
>> Erica Moore: Thank you, Dr. Moorman for such an
informative presentation.
Let's begin the Q&A.
And do you want to -- go, yep, thank you.
Next slide.
>> Bill Elwood: Perfect.
Thanks so much, Sara.
Regarding the participants, do feel free
to type your questions into the chat box.
While those are coming in, I'm wondering, in regards
to your recommendations, what do you -- what
examples do you know about that are -- that attempt
to cross that -- to bring together generations.
Particularly when there are so many housing
complexes and developments that are targeted for --
that that target is specifically for seniors.
>> Sara Moorman: So, this is [unintelligible].
I don't -- I'm not involved with her work itself.
But I know that I have read and seen on YouTube
where she's just running courses and things like
that and programs that bring older adults and
say, preschoolers together to do an art project
or a sing-along, things like that.
And the thing that concerns me about programs
like that is that the kids tend to be a lot more
active than the older adults.
And also, that they're not working together
on a shared goal.
And so, while I think it could mean that the kids
are entertaining for the older adults, I'm not
necessarily sure it does much towards breaking down
age stereotypes or, you know, building
relationships between the kids and the older adults.
>> Bill Elwood: Okay.
Does anyone at your -- at the BC Institute
focus on that?
>> Sara Moorman: Well, let's see.
Not that I'm aware of.
We have in the Boston area [unintelligible] Grant and
some of those projects, the interventions we
talked about, inter-generational exchange.
But like I said, I'm not aware of or active in any
of those groups.
>> Bill Elwood: That's just fine.
Could you talk about how your interest in
adolescence, how Erica mentioned your new
research on mild cognitive impairment relating to
risks originating in adolescence.
Can you talk about how your work has pointed you
in that direction, you know, as an ESI and
I'm an old ESI.
And many of us have had different career
trajectories and as someone who's had success
in this particular area that you're growing into
another, I think that would be a really great
teachable moment to some of the people on this call.
>> Sara Moorman: Well, let's see.
I think how adolescence is of interest to me in terms
of thinking about cognitive outcome is
because of a couple of factors.
One is that we know that there's a large amount of
neurological development happening in adolescence.
So, in search of respecters that could
hinder that growth would be things that have
long-term effects.
The other thing that adolescence is from life
perspective towards the beginning of the
accumulation of the biggest disadvantages.
So, if you think about children or adolescents,
school quality, their family socioeconomic
resources, that nature is sort of the building block
for what those aspects might be like what sorts
of health behaviors they engage in and so on later
in life which might indirectly affect their
cognitive health later on.
So, I'm interested in adolescence kind of in a
mediation versus direct effects kind of way, in
terms of it being the beginning looking at
cognitive health.
>> Bill Elwood: Excellent.
We've got a couple of questions in and I guess
I'll go with, since we're talking about health, what
statistical relationships do you see between
self-rated physical health and
psychological well-being?
>> Sara Moorman: They're positive in model.
I want to say that the correlation was
something like 1.4.
Generally, if you're in their self-reported health
series that are in better psychological
well-being as well.
But it's far from the one to one correlation.
>> Bill Elwood: And excellent.
Another question is -- well, first thanks
for the great talk.
How do you feel these findings might integrate
into public policy that supports the creating of
NORC's and providing support services for NORC's?
>> Sara Moorman: I think that the research
implies two things.
One is that there's definitely context in
which age integration is good.
And in fact, age integration might be
better than people initially thought because,
like I said, I think they're coming from a
different perspective and assuming they're having
older adults in those communities at all.
We can grab -- we're going to have greater needs for
service agencies and so on.
I think also the goal here is the fact that today
behind over-represented at older adults were
socially strong in place.
So, I mean, I'm a gerontologist.
I tend towards the NORC approach anyway.
But it certainly is the case with lots of older
adults are looking for age restricted
retirement communities.
So, I think that there needs to be a balance
between those two things and just recognition of
the very special strengths and weaknesses of those
two different options.
>> Bill Elwood: Great.
Here's another question that starts with an opinion.
As an opinion, I feel that populations are better
served by retaining full integration
in communities.
As a sociologist/gerontologist,
does this ring true for you?
>> Sara Moorman: Yeah, I mean, that's the
way I'm inclined also.
I have always appreciated having older adults around
me and one of the things I miss working on college
campuses that I never see kids younger than 18.
So, my inclination, yes, is also to face an
integration is good.
But different strokes for different folks.
I think it is also important to consider
context in which integration might be
beneficial or ways in which there's barriers
such as age discrimination that could be broken down
such that an integrated community is even better.
>> Bill Elwood: Okay, great.
This is a compound question: I'll read the
whole thing and you can decide how to unpack it.
Have you seen evidence that age discrimination
directly results in health risks?
>> Sara Moorman: I think evidence of age
discrimination, yes.
Age discrimination, like other kinds of
discrimination, is clearly associated with
psycho-social stress.
It's clearly associated with limitations and
resources and opportunities that are
available to people in order to promote their
health, to protect their health.
And it's clearly associated with various
physiological indicators of well-being such as
information, on fight or flight response, on
hormones, things of that nature.
So, yes.
>> Bill Elwood: Okay.
Could you speak to -- the second part -- could you
speak to the life-course aspects of age discrimination.
This participant said, certainly the
institutional of housing for the aged both in
retirement communities and skilled care
has contributed.
But, I think the main -- the major point here
unpacking this without context is life-course
aspects of age discrimination.
>> Sara Moorman: Okay, I'm going to take a direction
with that.
It may not be what the caller asked about.
So, if --they can ask again.
But different ages of people get -- a
life-course history of age discrimination is
complicated because different age groups are
disrespected and discriminated against
for different reasons.
So, younger people also experience age
discrimination on the stereotypical assumptions
that they're reckless, or uninformed, or unconcerned.
Older people experience age discrimination on the
assumption that they're impaired, incapable,
and things like that.
So, it started that age discrimination isn't just
restricted to -- it doesn't switch on when you
turn 60 and go from there.
It's something that affects people at various
stages of their life course and is strongly
intersectional with other kinds of discrimination
like racial discrimination and sex discrimination.
>> Bill Elwood: Great.
Do you think the benefits of having the elders as
part of the policy mechanism helps to ensure
full representative inclusion concerning
safety, zoning, health policy, you know, you
mentioned universal design, in the
larger community?
>> Sara Moorman: Yeah, I think it definitely does.
Certainly, even if these policies are put in places
all throughout their lives, it is the case that
things like that graded curb crossings are useful
for people with suitcases, they're useful for people
pushing baby carriages, they're useful for
people in wheelchairs.
So not having to step down there, for example, is a
small thing but it affects the well-being of a
large number of people.
>> Bill Elwood: Based on your -- I'm going to
follow up with this personally, do you see in
the data you've played with, did you see examples
of senior, I don't want to say activism, but senior
involvement in the policy process leading to change
or any associations of civic engagement with
health and well-being?
>> Sara Moorman: That's really good for the direction.
>> Bill Elwood: Okay.
>> Sara Moorman: To my knowledge, he might not
have any questions on that but when I was talking
before about the NHAT, the national health and aging
trends study that does have social network
rosters through the ages of everyone.
That survey does that ask nicely about community
participation and various kinds of physical
adaptations in the neighborhood and so on.
So, I can definitely feel the directions it would go.
>> Bill Elwood: Great.
Is there anything that you think I've missed?
I don't have any additional questions
coming in which is surprising, given we have
the scope of professional associations, of people
involved in community care, Volunteers of
America, Lubbock Senior Center, and people from a
variety of college campuses.
Is there anything else you'd like to speak to
before we wrap things up?
>> Sara Moorman: I don't think so.
>> Bill Elwood: Okay.
I think everyone can see why Sara is from our first
round of Matilda White Riley early stage
investigator scholars.
I want to thank you for the work you put into
creating and then presenting today.
I'd like to thank all of you for your
active participation.
We are, as Erica Moore told you at the beginning
of this session, we are recording this.
So, once we convert the file and provide closed
captions, we will make it available on our
YouTube channel.
Do stay tuned to your professional journals for
Sara Moorman's new work, both coming out and in her
new research interests.
And I'll let you all get back to your day.
Thank you so much again, Professor Moorman,
and thank you all.
>> Sara Moorman: Thanks very much, Bill.
>> Bill Elwood: All right.
Good bye.
For more infomation >> MY BODY IS READY | Think To Die - Duration: 7:35. 
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