Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6359-6409

Date of Award

Summer 8-31-2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Gerontology

First Advisor

Jeffrey A. Burr

Second Advisor

Jeffrey E. Stokes

Third Advisor

Shannon Ang

Abstract

Friendship is becoming more pertinent to older adults because they are increasingly living with fewer family ties in later life due to changing social and demographic trends (Fiori et al., 2020; Verdery et al., 2019). However, friendships are not as extensively studied as compared to family relationships (Blieszner et al., 2019). Thus, additional research is needed to better understand the influence of friendships on health and health behaviors in later life.

This dissertation includes three studies that focus on the association between friendship and loneliness, advanced care planning, and cognitive function, examining the role of gender in these three studies, which extend the limited literature on friendship, health, and health behaviors among older adults. The dissertation also highlights the strengths and limitations of the Convoy Model of Social Relations and the utilities and challenges of large, omnibus national surveys employed to support the Convoy Model.

Additionally, the dissertation demonstrates that the ways friendship are measured in these datasets are limited when studying loneliness, advanced care planning and cognitive function among older adults. Therefore, there is a need to create more refined measures of friendship in survey research. Additional cross-cultural comparative studies are required to gain better insights to the association between friendship and health in later life. On the whole, findings from the studies in this dissertation open the possibilities for future research work that can be employed to improve our understanding of the role of friendship play among older adults’ health outcomes and health behaviors.

Comments

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