A person-centred index of aging well and its determinants in North America

Positive models of aging, including aging well, as well as active, healthy or successful aging, are increasingly receiving attention from gerontologists and geriatricians. Yet important challenges exist in defining and measuring positive aging consistently for research, practice and policy purposes. As currently defined, successful aging is unachievable for the majority of older adults, because most of them have functional limitations and one or more chronic illnesses. The perspective of older adults themselves is broader, less medical, and more positive than those of researchers, and not dependent upon absence of disability or chronic illness. In this investigation, which will link data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging Study with two other large, national, longitudinal surveys of older adults, we propose to develop a person-centred index of aging well that integrates previous research on lay perspectives and to examine the individual and structural determinants of this concept in North America.