We sought to determine natural disaster preparedness levels among older US adults and assess factors that may adversely affect health and safety during such incidents.
We sampled adults aged 50 years or older (n = 1304) from the 2010 interview survey of the Health and Retirement Study. The survey gathered data on general demographic characteristics, disability status or functional limitations, and preparedness-related factors and behaviors. We calculated a general disaster preparedness score by using individual indicators to assess overall preparedness.
Participant (n = 1304) mean age was 70 years (SD = 9.3). Only 34.3% reported participating in an educational program or reading materials about disaster preparation. Nearly 15% reported using electrically powered medical devices that might be at risk in a power outage. The preparedness score indicated that increasing age, physical disability, and lower educational attainment and income were independently and significantly associated with worse overall preparedness.
Despite both greater vulnerability to disasters and continuous growth in the number of older US adults, many of the substantial problems discovered are remediable and require attention in the clinical, public health, and emergency management sectors of society.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 11. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 22 May 2019.
All research outputs
#4,446,428
of 34,404,538 outputs
Outputs from American Journal of Public Health
#5,359
of 14,189 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#45,306
of 311,963 outputs
Outputs of similar age from American Journal of Public Health
#61
of 138 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,404,538 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 86th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 14,189 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 40.2. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 62% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 311,963 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 138 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 55% of its contemporaries.
