We need to have a well-defined national-level goal which is something like this: Understand the psychological factors along with cognitive and biological mechanisms underlying decision making of older adults.
I say this as more than 65 million people are 65+ years in India as of 2021. To be fair, the ratio is low – at about 5.5% of the country’s population which has a low median age in the 30s because India’s demographic profile is currently skewed towards the young. Nevertheless, we are talking about a large number of people and many of them deserve the utmost dignity being senior citizens of the country. In another 40 years, millions of current citizens (the largest share of the demographics) might skew towards an older population.
Having a clear idea about how elderly people think can help us channel information and help them take decisions that might be beneficial to them (and sometimes the entire household as many of such people are also decision-makers for the family). Take the example of Unites States – a dedicated National Institute on Aging (under the National Institutes of Health which are government research-based initiatives) has set forth strategic directions for research (2020-2025) that include the following: Better understanding the effects of personal, interpersonal, and societal factors on aging, including the mechanisms through which these factors exert their effects. Under that goal, these are the following sub-goals (source: nia.nih.gov):
- B-1: Understand the basic behavioral, social, and psychological aspects of aging.
- B-2: Illuminate the pathways by which social, psychological, economic, and behavioral factors affect health in middle-aged and older adults.
- B-3: Identify developmental, prenatal, early life, and environmental exposures that affect individual differences in trajectories of biological, cognitive, and functional aging; the risk of disease and death; and the capacity for resilience and adaptation.
- B-4: Explore the mechanisms that account for the effects of social adversity and disadvantage, including research that focuses on critical periods for reversing such effects and/or the optimal timing of intervention.
- B-5: Better understand motivation, decision-making, and mechanisms of behavior change among older adults.
- B-6: Consider the role of place in the aging processes, taking into account geography in studies of late-life disability and mortality trends.
