| Title |
Conditions and Impacts of Age-Friendly Living Environments from the Perspective of Healthy Aging |
| Authors |
곽페진(Guo, Pei-Jin) ; 이민(Lee, Min) |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.14774/JKIID.2026.35.5.039 |
| Keywords |
Healthy aging; Age-friendly environment; Older adults; Living environment; Environmental efficacy |
| Abstract |
This study empirically examines how the spatial conditions of older adults’ living environments influence Environmental Efficacy in support of Healthy Aging. Drawing on Lawton and Nahemow’s (1973) Press-Competence Model and the WHO’s (2015) Healthy Aging framework, three spatial dimensions were a priori constructed? Supportive, Enabling, and Connective Environments?and Environmental Efficacy was operationalized through four sub-dimensions: independent outing (D1), autonomous mobility (D2), self-reliant living satisfaction (D3), and long-term residence intention (D4). A questionnaire was administered to 145 community-dwelling older adults in Zhengzhou, China. After confirming the reliability and convergent validity of the measurement instrument, four separate hierarchical regression analyses were conducted with D1?D4 as dependent variables. The results revealed distinctive pathways. D1 was solely predicted by Connective Environment (β=.792***, p<.001), and D3 by Supportive Environment (β=.365**, p<.01), whereas D2 and D4 were jointly predicted by both the Supportive and Connective Environments. Enabling Environment lost its independent significance in the full models, indicating that its unique explanatory variance was largely subsumed by the other two dimensions rather than functioning as an independent intervention. These findings were corroborated by in-depth interviews with five participants. The findings suggest that age-friendly living environments should be conceived not as a single integrated outcome but as a dual-pathway system, in which physical safety and social?psychological connectedness operate through differential mechanisms across distinct domains of older adults’ everyday life. The study offers an empirically grounded spatial indicator framework for Healthy Aging-oriented design. |