Healthy Aging and Community Learning – Findings from Lifelong Learning Courses

Reduced social connectedness is an emerging problem faced by older adults, which is harmful to their physical and mental health. Lifelong learning is a potential opportunity to increase older adults’ social connectedness by creating a classroom-based community, and accordingly promote older learners’ well-being. This exploratory study aimed to understand the association between older adults' perceived classroom connectedness (CC), and their emotional well-being, including happiness and loneliness.

A total of 482 headcount of Hong Kong Chinese older adults registered for classroom-based courses in a variety of topics offered from April to July 2018. They were invited to fill in a questionnaire in the final session of the course, and 343 questionnaires were collected with a response rate of 71.2%. For those who have attended multiple courses and filled in multiple questionnaires, information from only one questionnaire is randomly chosen for analytic use. Eventually, 200 valid questionnaires were used in the data analysis. Classroom connectedness was measured by the connectedness subscale of Classroom Community Scale (CCS). Happiness was measured by the validated single-item self-reported measure. Loneliness was measured by the De Jong Gierveld 6-item scale measuring social and emotional loneliness. Methods including descriptive statistics, bivariate correlation, and linear regressions were adopted. Two-way ANOVA was used to test whether there are any moderating effects of socio-demographic or course-related factors.

Descriptive statistics show that the participants perceive a high level of classroom connectedness. The bivariate correlation shows that CC is related to a lower level of social loneliness and a higher level of happiness. Linear regressions show that CC is positively related to higher level of happiness among older learners, controlling demographic characteristics and loneliness. Two-way ANOVA shows that the total length of the course moderates the relationship between CC and older adults’ social loneliness. Specifically, CC perceived by older adults enrolled in courses with a greater length has a stronger association with reduced social loneliness.

Even though this study is cross-sectional in nature and its sample size is relatively small, it carries some implications for future research and practice. Importantly, as social isolation is an emerging problem faced by older adults, how to enhance social connectedness in the context of a classroom and its influence on psychosocial well-being of older learners, such as reduced loneliness, need more examination by longitudinal and experimental studies in the future. Moreover, it is of potential importance to compare the health outcomes of lifelong learning programs in different modes, such as length as found in this study.