Articles
The Journal on Active Aging brings articles of value to professionals dedicated to older-adult quality of life. Content sweeps across the active-aging landscape to focus on education and practice. Find articles of interest by searching the article archives in three ways: Enter a keyword in the articles search bar; click on search by topic; or type a keyword or phrase in the general search bar at the top of the page.
Stop and think before you hit your email 'send' button by Debra J. Schmidt
Would you be comfortable having your email message, with your name attached, appear in Newsweek magazine? If not, don’t hit the “send” button.
That’s exactly what happened after a young woman sent the following email message to 170 people in 2004. It was picked up by the news media and flew over the Internet faster than the speed of light.
Communication
Start the publicity machine for Active Aging Week by Patricia Ryan, MS
How will older adults know about your Active Aging Week events? If your week’s activities are going to introduce or reinforce the benefits of an active lifestyle, people need to attend! That’s where your media strategy comes into play.
Active Aging Week has features that you can promote to gain media attention. The week’s activities are for a good cause: promoting healthy, active lifestyles among older adults. All the events are free. The events support community health and well-being, particularly when they include families and people of all ages. Often many organizations, individuals and groups participate, which showcases how people in the community work together. Not to mention, Active Aging Week events are often very visual photo opportunities.
ICAA initiatives
Move! Surefire ways to motivate and inspire older adults to be active by Marilynn Larkin, MA
Recent research confirms that Americans spend the majority of their time (55% or close to 8 hours a day overall) in behaviors that require little energy expenditure. Investigators used activity monitors to measure how many hours in a waking day adults and children engaged in behaviors associated with sitting, reclining and lying down. Not surprisingly, the most sedentary groups were older adolescents and adults over age 60, who spent about 60% of their waking time in sedentary pursuits. Moreover, although women were less active than men before age 30, men became less active than women after age 60. The increase in low-energy activity logged by older adults, especially males, may relate to their having more leisure time after retirement and/or developing health conditions, according to the researchers.
moreMotivation
Introducing disc golf for older adults by Don Dillon
Remember the popular game of Frisbee, which involved players throwing a plastic disc to each other? In the 1970s that sport was expanded into disc golf, an activity that may be the fastest-growing sport in the United States—perhaps the world—according to the Professional Disc Golf Association. Yet the benefits of disc golf for encouraging better health and wellness in older adults appear largely unknown to organizations such as retirement communities and seniors centers.
moreSports and athletics
Cultivating a water exercise program using an evaluation approach Part two: program strategies, effectiveness and sustainability by Mary E. Sanders, PhD, FASM
Evidence-based program design depends on using sound scientific research to shape programs that meet the needs of participants through “best practice” decisions. An evaluation approach offers active-aging professionals a systematic method for developing programs derived from scientific evidence.
Daniel L. Stufflebeam, PhD, a professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, developed a decision-making framework that addresses four different kinds of decisions faced by program developers.
Program management
Aging in the USA: indicators of well-being for adults 65 and over
Average life expectancy continues to increase, and today’s older Americans enjoy better health and financial security than any previous generation. However, rates of gain are inconsistent between the sexes and across age brackets, income levels, and racial and ethnic groups. Some critical disparities also exist between older Americans and older people in other industrialized countries. These and other trends are reported in Older Americans 2008: Key Indicators of Well-Being, a comprehensive look at aging in the United States from the Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics.
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