School of Engineering and School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
BMC Public Health. 2011 Nov 1;11:839. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-11-839.
There is renewed interest in the role of the built environment in public health. Relatively little research to date investigates its impact on healthy ageing. Ageing in place has been adopted as a key strategy for coping with the challenges of longevity. What is needed is a better understanding of how individual characteristics of older people's residential environments (from front door to wider neighbourhood) contribute to their wellbeing, in order to provide the basis for evidence-based housing/urban design and development of interventions. This research aimed to develop a tool to objectively measure a large range of built environment characteristics, as the basis for a preliminary study of potential relationships with a number of 'place-related' functional, emotional and social wellbeing constructs.
Through a review of urban design literature, design documents, and existing measures, a new tool, the NeDeCC (Neighbourhood Design Characteristics Checklist) was developed. It was piloted, refined, and its reliability validated through inter-rater tests. A range of place-related wellbeing constructs were identified and measured through interviews with 200 older people living in a wide variety of rural-urban environments and different types of housing in England. The NeDeCC was used to measure the residential environment of each participant, and significant bivariate relationships with wellbeing variables were identified.
The NeDeCC was found to have convincing face and construct validity and good inter-rater and test/retest reliability, though it would benefit from use of digital data sources such as Google Earth to eliminate the need for on-site survey. The significant relationships found in the study suggest that there may be characteristics of residential environments of potential relevance for older people's lives that have been overlooked in research to date, and that it may be worthwhile to question some of the assumptions about where and how older people want to live (e.g. villages seem to be positive). They also point to the importance of considering non-linear relationships.
The NeDeCC provides the basis for generation of evidence-based design guidance if it is used in prospective controlled studies or 'natural experiments' in the future. Ultimately, this will facilitate the creation of better places for ageing in place.
人们对建筑环境在公共卫生中的作用重新产生了兴趣。迄今为止，相对较少的研究调查其对健康老龄化的影响。就地老龄化已被采纳为应对长寿挑战的关键策略。现在需要更好地了解老年人居住环境的个体特征（从前门到更广泛的社区）如何促进他们的幸福感，以便为基于证据的住房/城市设计和干预措施的发展提供基础。这项研究旨在开发一种工具来客观地衡量大量的建筑环境特征，作为对与许多“与地点相关”的功能、情感和社会幸福感结构潜在关系的初步研究的基础。
通过对城市设计文献、设计文件和现有措施的审查，开发了一种新工具，即 NeDeCC（邻里设计特征清单）。通过对不同环境和不同类型住房中居住的 200 名老年人进行的 200 次访谈，对其进行了试点、改进和可靠性验证。确定了一系列与地点相关的幸福感结构，并通过访谈进行了衡量。NeDeCC 用于衡量每位参与者的居住环境，并确定了与幸福感变量的显著二元关系。
发现 NeDeCC 具有令人信服的表面效度和结构效度，以及良好的评分者间和测试/重测信度，尽管如果能使用 Google Earth 等数字数据源，它将受益于消除对现场调查的需求。该研究中发现的显著关系表明，老年人生活的居住环境可能存在一些迄今为止在研究中被忽视的潜在相关特征，并且质疑一些关于老年人想要居住的地点和方式的假设可能是值得的（例如，村庄似乎是积极的）。它们还指出了考虑非线性关系的重要性。
如果未来在前瞻性对照研究或“自然实验”中使用 NeDeCC，它将为生成基于证据的设计指南提供基础。最终，这将有助于为就地老龄化创造更好的场所。
