Environmental Influences on Mental Health: Path Analysis for Contextual Implementation
Channel: Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA/ÉLCV)
Date: 2022-04-06

This webinar explores potential contextual influences that may confound your study, and ways to overcome them.

We begin with an overview of age and sex trends in depressive symptoms (Best et al., 2021) which highlights the need for intervention among ages 70 and over. Next, we demonstrate the usefulness of path analysis to identify individual and environmental levers for health promotion, and how these levers interact. Specifically, we show that housing and neighbourhood factors influence mental health through loneliness (Gan, Wister et al., 2022). Psychosocial interventions would do well to target loneliness at the individual level. In a separate study, the effects of place-based variables are also found at the neighbourhood level, suggesting that cohesion is especially important in neighbourhoods with greater socioeconomic deprivation (forthcoming). Community-engaged interventions would be necessary in complex contexts. 

As the demand for age-friendly neighbourhoods increases, systematic development of evidence-based interventions are required. Path analysis using CLSA data identifies relevant intermediate targets, and provides a framework to compare implementation sites for tailored interventions and translation across contexts. Contextual data can inform intervention development without compromising the need for theory-based interventions.