Developing Age-Friendly Social Participation Strategies: Service Providers’ Perspectives about Organizational and Sector Readiness for Aging Baby Boomers

This paper examines service providers’ readiness to address the social participation expectations of aging baby boomers in the context of an Age-Friendly Cities framework in a mid-sized Canadian city. A convergent mixed-methods research approach was used for this study. Data were collected using a combination of online surveys (n = 32) and face-to-face interviews (n = 20) with key informants. Closed-ended survey questions were analyzed using descriptive statistics, while open-ended survey questions and interview transcripts were analyzed for thematic content following a constant comparison method. Overall, the findings indicate that while service providers identified social participation as an important focus area, there are a number of considerations that need to be addressed in order to enhance readiness to meet the emerging social participation needs of aging baby boomers. While this study was conducted in one city in Canada, the results may help professionals elsewhere to critically reflect on the development, implementation, and assessment of their own age-friendly social participation practices, programs, and policies.