Elder mistreatment and psychological resilience: the moderating role of social support

ABSTRACT

This study examines the possible consequence of elder mistreatment on resilience and whether social support moderates this posited association, using a rural sample of 432 community-dwelling older Chinese adults aged 60 to 79 years. Elder abuse included verbal abuse, physical abuse, or financial exploitation. Social support was measured by The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). Resilience was represented by a seven-item scale. Hierarchical regression models indicated that mistreatment is significantly related to low levels of resilience when confounding factors are adjusted. A significant interaction term (abuse × social support) was also detected. Mistreated respondents who reported higher levels of social support were less likely to experience low resilience compared to those with lower levels of social support. Social support buffers against the undesirable effect of mistreatment on resilience, especially for those who were abused.

KEYWORDS:

• Buffering hypothesis
• China
• elder abuse
• stress process theory
• Johnson-Neyman plot

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Shujun Tian, Xia Sun, Wen Li, and Yang Yang for their valuable assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The data collection was supported by the University of Utah Center on Aging 2014 Pilot Grant.