Social participation, a factor to consider in the clinical evaluation of the older adult: A narrative review

Abstract

Social participation is defined as the integration of people into community activities in voluntary or mandatory, formal and informal social groups, which could have consequences concerning the health of the older population. A search was conducted on Pubmed, Scielo, Scopus and Google Scholar. For this review, 16 articles studying the impact of social participation on older adults were analyzed, including a total of 73,698,096 individuals from North America, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Social participation is considered a protective factor for the mental and physical health of older adults, which has been associated with decreases in disability, co-morbidities, and mortality. For this reason, it is suggested that it should be evaluated in clinical practice. This would make it possible to orient and refer older adults to participate in certain community organizations, mainly those who do not have support networks, who are not linked to community groups, who have symptoms of depression or who are beginning to show physical or cognitive deterioration. In this way, public health could increase its prevention and health promotion actions through community organizations. On the other hand, the lack of instruments and consensus to evaluate social participation was discussed in this review where a questionnaire to evaluate the social participation of the older adult has been proposed to be validated and studied in the future.