2 Social resources Social provisions Self-eﬃcacy Physical health Mental health Figure 1: The study’s conceptual model was based on the theoretical work of Antonucci et al. [13]. For very old adults, residential setting (e.g., private home, assisted living facility, or nursing home), one assessment of contextual experience, is very salient to the constructs of the support-eﬃcacy model [14–16]. Long-term care is often needed by older adults. It is estimated that by 2050, the total number of individuals subscribing to paid long-term care, whether at home or in some type of residential care, will likely double from 13 million in the year 2000 to 27 million [17]. According to a 2009 report by The National Center for Assisted Living, more than 900,000 adults, whose average age was 86.9 years, resided in assisted living facilities [18]. Regarding nursing home care, researchers found that the number of individuals receiving such care, on any given day, rose from 1.28 million in 1977 to 1.63 million by 1999, a 27% increase [19]. Bowling and Grundy reviewed literature focused on the association between older adults’ social resources and mortality in population-based longitudinal studies [20]. They found substantial evidence for the relationship between social support, social network structure, health status, mortality, and likelihood of entry into institutional care. Regarding the moderating role of residential status, empirical research has demonstrated that measures of social relations, including structural (i.e., social networks) and functional (i.e., social provisions) assessments, diﬀer across residence status [16, 20]. Thus, the current study’s purpose was to specify and test a version of Antonucci and colleagues’ [13] mediating model (see Figure 1) using cross-sectional data from participants in the Georgia Centenarian Study [21] who resided in three distinct living environments: private homes, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes. Close social relationships received much attention in the literature over the past decades both from a theoretical [13, 22, 23] and empirical [3, 24–26] perspective resulting in strong evidence that older adults with high levels of social resources enjoy better health (physical and mental) than those lacking in close relationships. Convoy, according to Antonucci et al., depicts the close relationships that surround an individual and promote positive development [13]. Social relations, a term often used to deﬁne and identify convoy relationships [24], may be operationalized to encompass social networks (a structural assessment) and social support (a functional assessment) [27]. Structural assessments of convoy members include measures of network size, member type (e.g., friend or family member), network members’ geographical propinquity, and frequency and type of contact Journal of Aging Research with network members. Functional assessments address the question of what type of support network members provide [28], such as instrumental or emotional support. Krause [29] reviewed over a dozen diﬀerent types of support from the literature. The current study included both structural and functional assessments of social relations in the tested model. The literature calls for investigations of mediating mechanisms through which social relationships inﬂuence health outcomes, in particular assessments of self-eﬃcacy, human agency, mastery, competence, and control [13, 30]. Conceptually, perceived control over one’s life events and conditions is closely related to various measures of compe- tence such as internal locus of control, mastery, and self- eﬃcacy [2, 24, 31]. According to Ross and Sastry [32], perceived control may tap the same underlying construct as self-eﬃcacy. Over time, contact with signiﬁcant members of one’s social network and the diﬀerent types of support provided may increase an individual’s sense of worth and ability to inﬂuence the situational environment. This study featured a measure of self-eﬃcacy, competence as measured by the NEO PI-R [33, 34], as the mediating mechanism through which social relations inﬂuenced health outcomes. The competence facet, from conscientiousness, addresses how capable or eﬀective an individual feels. The current study extended the literature by investigating the support-eﬃcacy model with very old adults (i.e., cente- narians) and by examining the moderating inﬂuence of living environment (e.g., centenarians in private homes, in assisted living facilities, and in nursing homes). Bowling and Grundy challenged researchers to consider inﬂuential variables that need to be controlled and intervening variables that might explain such associations [20]. Our analyses controlled for sex, education, perceived economic suﬃciency, and instru- mental activities of daily living in our analyses [35, 36]. Based on the literature describing the various reasons for residing in a private home, an assisted living facility, and a nursing home (e.g., loss of spouse; decrease in functional, physi- cal, or mental capacity), we hypothesized that the model would ﬁt the data uniquely for each subsample because the living environments and the contextual situations of the participants inﬂuence their physical and mental health diﬀerentially [37–40]. How the relationships between the models’ variables diﬀer by residence status was a research question we investigated. 2. Method 2.1. Participants and Procedures. Data for this study came from a Georgia population-based sample of centenarians and octogenarians collected between 2002 and 2005. The sample, comprised of adults aged 98 years and older, was based on a census from a 44-county northern Georgia region including all skilled nursing and personal care facilities. In addition, registered voter lists and corroborating birth date information was also used to identify participants in that region. A refusal to participate rate was not possible to estimate due to the complexities of the sampling strategy. Of the estimated 1244 eligible centenarians in the population, 19.2% participated, whereas 135 who declined to participate