Vision, out-of-home activities, and emotional well-being in old age: Do macro-contexts make a difference?

This study examined the role of vision in connection with psychological, social network related, and socio-structural predictors of out-of-home everyday functioning and emotional well-being. The sample consisted of 1519 community dwelling elderly (55-98 years) from Germany, and comparative samples from Finland (n = 610) and Italy (n = 600). Half of the participants resided in urban areas, while the other half resided in rural regions. Structural equation modeling supports the hypothesis of robust relations among age, vision, intellectual functioning, out-of-home everyday functioning, and emotional well-being that are comparable across countries. In detail, vision mediated the effect of age on out-of-home activities of daily living and 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 this basic model with additional variables (i.e., outdoor motivation, social and financial resources) revealed some contextual variations in Germany: first, social resources contributed more to out-of-home leisure activities in the rural than in the urban samples. Second, outdoor motivation was significantly related to social resources in the urban, but not in the rural samples. Third, financial resources contributed modestly but significantly to out-of-home leisure activities in East Germany, but not in West Germany. It is concluded that in different macro-contexts different contextual resources are able to enhance everyday functioning of older individuals and that vision plays an important though not all-dominant role within this network of resources.