| Over the last several years, a great deal of effort has been put into the study and promotion of older adult civic engagement with its purported contributions to healthy aging and healthy communities. The empirical research has operationalized civic engagement primarily as formal volunteerism and has focused predominantly on individual health and well-being outcomes of such engagement as assessed through quantitative methods. However, there is a paucity of research on older adult community involvement more broadly defined and very little research has been done on the meanings older adults themselves have about community involvement and healthy aging.;This study takes a grounded theory approach to explore the lived experiences of community involvement among a diverse sample of 22 older adults, ages 60-93 years old, who are currently engaged in various types of community work. Qualitative methods are used to elicit in-depth narratives regarding community involvement and healthy aging, to explore subjective meanings of community work and how those meanings are situated within one's experience of aging, and to look at how older adults involved in community work think about "healthy aging.";Three key findings provide a multi-dimensional picture of elders' community involvement and healthy aging that reflects reciprocal interactions between individual, interpersonal and broader social, political and economic contexts. First, community involvement is part of the larger dynamic processes of community building and social capital formation. Involvement is not simply an individual act. Second, healthy aging is seen by these elders as a web of social, political and economic processes involving self, community and society. Healthy aging is not a static state, but rather it is "how I'm trying to live my life." Finally, community involvement, aging and health are processes the elders negotiate in their own ways and with their own definitions. While they do not harbor the illusion that they are in complete control of these processes, they employ strategies that signify varying degrees of agency in these dynamic processes. These strategies reflect processes of aging on their own terms. |
