Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC), William S. Middleton Veterans Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Gerontologist. 2024 May 1;64(5). doi: 10.1093/geront/gnad106.
Age-friendly communities are those with characteristics that can support and promote healthy aging. Among the common domains of these characteristics, transportation and neighborhood spaces are particularly relevant for older adults maintaining mobility in their communities. The objective of this scoping review is to provide a synthesis of age-friendly community indicators, developed for research and planning, that evaluate characteristics most associated with community-level mobility, specifically transportation and neighborhood spaces.
We conducted a systematic search of PubMed, Scopus, Medline, APA PsychInfo, CINAHL Plus, SocIndex, Academic Search Premier, and Web of Science. We reviewed 8 articles and reports that described the development or evaluation of a set of generalizable indicators to measure the age-friendliness of a community's transportation and neighborhood spaces resources.
Indicators of transportation and neighborhood spaces ranged from self-reported measures of accessibility and convenience to objective measures of the availability and cost of services. Explicit discussion of mobility at the community level was variable in these records, and few authors specifically discussed common life transitions impacted by these age-friendly community indicators, such as driving cessation.
Although age-friendly communities are a well-established goal for promoting healthy aging, our review found few validated approaches for measuring age-friendliness that researchers and communities can use to investigate mobility at the community level. This is an important gap in studying life transitions such as driving cessation. Further research can provide a better understanding of which community characteristics support ongoing mobility.
友好社区是指具有支持和促进健康老龄化特征的社区。在这些特征的常见领域中，交通和邻里空间对于维持社区内行动能力的老年人尤为重要。本研究旨在综合评估与社区层面移动性最相关的友好社区指标，这些指标是为研究和规划而制定的，具体涉及交通和邻里空间特征。
我们对 PubMed、Scopus、Medline、APA PsychInfo、CINAHL Plus、SocIndex、Academic Search Premier 和 Web of Science 进行了系统检索。我们回顾了 8 篇描述了一套可推广指标的开发或评估的文章和报告，这些指标用于衡量社区交通和邻里空间资源的友好程度。
交通和邻里空间指标的范围从可及性和便利性的自我报告测量到服务的可用性和成本的客观测量。这些记录中对社区层面移动性的明确讨论各不相同，而且很少有作者专门讨论这些友好社区指标对常见生活过渡的影响，例如停止驾驶。
尽管友好社区是促进健康老龄化的既定目标，但我们的综述发现，用于研究社区层面移动性的、经研究人员和社区验证的友好度衡量方法很少。这是研究生活过渡（如停止驾驶）方面的一个重要差距。进一步的研究可以更好地了解哪些社区特征支持持续的移动性。
