Socially inclusive ageing: a lifecourse study of new ageing populations

Being socially healthy, not being lonely or isolated, having strong relationships and feeling part of the local community, promotes the health and wellbeing of older people. Statistics show that people with good social health live longer than those with poor social health. They also have better physical and mental health and are less likely to drink alcohol to excess, smoke or be sedentary and not physically active. Promoting and supporting good social relationships is one way to contribute to a key government policy, the health ageing grand challenge which aims to increase healthy active life by 5 years by 2035 and reduce the up to 20-year difference in this between the most and least privileged groups in Britain. Because of the importance of social health, a range of services, and policies to help us be socially healthy have been developed but few have achieved this goal.

We think part of our failure to provide services that can improve social health may be because our understanding of what promotes good social health is limited by the type of studies do. Most studies measure social health at only at one time point. Our study will look at information about social health provided by people aged 40 and over for a much longer period.
This could be several decades or even across the whole of their adult life. This way we can map the pathways into and out of poor social health; the characteristics of those groups who move /into and out of poor social health and the events that are linked to these changes such as divorce or other things such as wealth or a neighbourhood that has lots of open spaces.

Our understanding of the social health of older people is limited because our research often excludes certain groups of older people. Our project includes three group of older adults about whom we know little about. Our first group are those people who are 'growing old in a foreign land' who migrated from the Caribbean/Indian sub-continent to the UK between 1950-1975. These people often came for work and never intended to grow old here. Our second group are those ageing with disabilities physical mental that they have had from birth. Because of increases in survival rates people born with cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome can now expect to live, on average, to their 60s. Our third group are older adults with LGBTQ+ identity. All these groups have experienced significant discrimination across their lifecourse we will find out if it has affected their social health.

We will compare social health and how it changes over time for people aged 40 and older from our 3 groups and compare this with the experiences of people of the same age and gender drawn from the wider community. We will look at how experiences across the lifecourse such as bereavement or divorce, are linked with social health. We use birth cohorts that have followed up all the children born in one week in 1946, 1958 and 1970. We will use surveys which focus on those aged 50+ such the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing which has followed people up for 20 years and the Understanding Society study which has been following people up since 1991. We will also conduct interviews with people from each of our three groups to get their stories about experiences of ageing and their social health.

The information from our project will collect may help us to design services, policies and interventions that are timelier and more tailored to the needs of individual older people and so help to promote a healthier and more active old age. We will work together with older people, those who develop policies and service providers to pull together the things we have learned and share it with as many people as possible. We will work with older people and service providers to develop resources such as guidelines and toolkits, and networks for sharing information. This will allow more people to use the results of our research and help design better services.