This animated video provides an overview and summary of the ‘Lifecourse of Place: how environments throughout life can support healthy ageing’ interdisciplinary research project. The project ran from September 2020 for 24 months and involved expertise from human geography, psychology, epidemiology and landscape architecture, included partners from policy and advocacy, and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Secondary Data Analysis Initiative (grant award ES/T003669/1).

With the number of older people increasing rapidly across the world, finding ways to create the environments that ensure everyone has the opportunity to live a long and healthy life is increasingly important. The latest research tells us that the places where people live and grow older can support healthy ageing, and that factors across the whole of our lives are potentially important. However, what we are less clear about is which aspects of the environment support healthy ageing and how these factors work to “get under the skin” to affect our health.

The aim of this research was to examine whether and how exposure to various environmental factors in childhood, adulthood and old age affects healthy ageing. It made use of a unique dataset that follows adults born in 1936 in the area around Edinburgh, Scotland – the Lothian Birth Cohort. We used information collected from historical records about the neighbourhoods that the participants have lived in throughout their lives to examine these questions.

Watch ‘Lifecourse of place’ directly on Media Hopper Create
 

 

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