Visual Capacity, Out-of-home Activities and Emotional Well-being in Old Age: Basic Relations and Contextual Variation

This work examined the role of visual capacity in connection with psychological, social network related, and socio-structural predictors of out-of-home everyday functioning and emotional well-being. The results are based on a sample of 1519 community dwelling elderly (55–98 years; mean age 70.8 years), 757 of them were living in urban, and 762 were living in rural regions, half-and-half from East and West Germany. Structural equation modeling supported the hypothesis of robust relations among age, vision, intellectual functioning, out-of-home everyday functioning, and emotional well-being that are largely independent of the regional and societal macro context. In detail, vision mediated the effect of age on out-of-home activities of daily living (ADL/IADL) and leisure activities, while intellectual functioning mediated the effect of vision on out-of-home leisure activities. All effects on emotional well-being were mediated by out-of-home leisure activities. Enriching the micro level model with psycho-social variables (i.e., outdoor motivation and social resources) and an indication of the socio-economic situation (i.e., financial resources) revealed some contextual variations: At this meso level of analysis, social resources contributed less and outdoor motivation contributed more to out-of-home leisure activities in the urban than in the rural sample. Second, outdoor motivation was significantly related to social resources in the urban, but not in the rural sample. Third, financial resources contributed modestly but significantly to out-of-home leisure activities in the East German, but not in the West German urban and rural samples. It is concluded that visual capacity plays a substantial role in a robust micro level model able to predict everyday functioning and well-being. If additional resources adding to the prediction of these outcomes are also taken into consideration in a meso level analysis model, the whole variable interplay becomes more strongly affected by macro contextual variation.