Exploring the contribution of built environments and mobility to older adults' positive ageing in place

Posted by on 15 January 2023

Tags: HOPE Foundation Scholar, ageing in place

Project summary report

by Tessa Pocock, University of Auckland

I would like to thank the HOPE Foundation Board and Sponsors for supporting my research. I am incredibly grateful to receive this scholarship for a second year and to have the opportunity to pursue further research dissemination activities.

This final year of my PhD journey has been filled with several challenges, but also numerous successes. Two of my key successes were:

• Successfully publishing one of the major pieces of my thesis, which serves as the foundation for subsequent phases (link to published work).
• Receiving ethics approval and completing the final piece of data collection for my thesis. This phase involved an online workshop with participants where creative communication approaches were used to prompt meaningful discussion on key evidence-based models from the two previous phases of my work. I am in the process of writing up this final piece of work for publication.

Aligning with my original application, I used the financial support from the HOPE Foundation Scholarship to enhance dissemination of my findings with participants and the research community. I will briefly discuss each of these dissemination activities below.

The Australian Association of Gerontology Conference, Adelaide, Australia (November 2022) was the first international conference that I attended as a PhD student. I created and presented a poster (title: Prompting meaningful discussions on feeling good and living well for community-living older adults) and engaged in wonderful discussions with attendees. This was a fabulous opportunity to connect with researchers and PhD students from within Australia and New Zealand and hear about the variety of research that was occurring in different contexts.

To complement the online workshop described above, an illustrator was present in the background of the Zoom call drawing participants’ ideas and stories as they were presented. This illustration provided a wonderful reflection and validation tool for participants. As part of my analysis, this illustration was updated to reflect further connections between spoken words. Participants received a copy, and the illustration was also used in my poster presentation at the AAG conference.

Due to several unforeseen delays throughout this year, I am still in the process of writing up the findings from my online workshop for publication. My current plan is to have this article submitted to the peer-reviewed Journal of Aging and Health in February 2023. My allocated funding will be used to cover the article processing charges for open access publication.