The first work package concerned developing the active ageing scale in a multiphase process including literature review, expert panel work, pilot data collecting, feedback study and psychometric testing. The University of Jyväskylä active ageing scale was completed at month 12 and published a bit later. Parallel to scale development we initiated the process on planning the individualized counselling intervention. The intervention planning was completed in schedule after 12 months. The next phase was planning and setting up the cohort and intervention study protocol and recruitment of participants. We then recruited research assistants and trained them to conduct the assessment.
The cohort study consists of a phone interview, a self-report questionnaire, face-to-dace interview at participants' homes, monitoring of free living physical activity and heart rate for one week, and laboratory assessments of health, physical functioning and cognition. Collecting cohort data took 1.5 years (excluding summer months). The participants were recruited from the population register data by contacting everybody in the sample personally and enquiring about their interest to take part and by assessing their suitability for the study (living in the target area, consent, able to communicate in a meaningful way). Participants were visited at their home by a trained interviewer and one week later arrived to the research laboratory for assessments. We have a dataset on predictors and consequences of active ageing that is profoundly interdisciplinary. Following this, efforts were directed to analyzing and reporting of data. We also prepared for a follow-up study of the AGNES cohort that will be supported by new grants from Academy of Finland and Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.
The COVID-19 pandemic made it paramount to study active ageing among our cohort during the social distancing and the emergency powers act. Even though the COVID-19 pandemic was a tragedy, scientifically it was an interesting natural experiment on reducing the opportunities of older people for social participation. It enabled us to plan experiments related to resilience of older people in terms of their activity. This opportunity presented itself, and we chose to expand our study to cover it. In spring 2020 we sent out questionnaires to all baseline participants to enquire about their activity during the social distancing recommendation. More than 80% of the baseline participants responded.
