Rural Older Adults’ Perspectives of Activities to Support Cognitive Health

ABSTRACT

Existing cognitive health literature focuses predominately on understanding the pathology and clinical treatment of older adults with dementia rather than cognitive health promotion and preventative activities. In addition, most of the work in the area remains urban-centric with little focus on cognitive health in rural communities. This study examined rural seniors’ perspectives of activities that they identified as supporting their cognitive health.

Using community-based research and an ethnographic methodology, participant observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 older adults in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Participants discussed a variety of activities that they viewed as supporting their cognitive health. In particular, cognitive health promotion was identified as being strongly linked to keeping one’s brain active, thinking positively, mingling with others, and managing daily affairs. This study’s findings suggest that there is a need to move beyond focusing solely on clinical interventions to including older adults’ perspectives of preventative activities and cognitive health promotion.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive health
• activities
• prevention
• health promotion
• rural health
• dementia
• community-based research
• ethnography

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Alzheimer Society of Canada; Canadian Institutes for Health Research; the Public Health and Agricultural Rural Ecosystem (PHARE) Graduate Training Scholarship; and the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation.