What Truly Measures Social Frailty?
In the article “Revisiting the social frailty index in aging adults: relevance and implications for an emerging construct,” published in GeroScience, Charlie Collinge, graduate student, Monica Luciana, faculty, and Alessandro Bartolomucci, collaborator from the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology at UMN, examine a recently developed measure of social frailty–the Social Frailty Index (SFI-10)–to evaluate whether it actually measures “social frailty” as a unique psychological and behavioral construct.
The physical aspects of frailty - or physical frailty - are well-characterized, but the social aspects of frailty - social frailty - are understudied in the fields of geroscience and gerontology. In their evaluation of the SFI-10, they raise two fundamental questions: 1) What do we mean when we talk about social frailty? 2) How can we best measure it? The SFI-10 includes age, sex, eight social-environmental factors and was designed to predict mortality outcomes in older adults. To evaluate the SFI-10 as an index of social frailty, Collinge Bartolomucci, and Luciana sought to isolate the true impact of social factors measured in the SFI-10 by comparing it to an index consisting only of the 8 social-environmental variables (SFI-8) in the tool, separate from age and sex. Their findings show that when it comes to the SFI-10’s ability to predict mortality in older adults, age and sex do most of the heavy lifting, while the social items add little in aggregate or by themselves. However, in theoretically-informed tests of construct validity, the SFI-8 aligns better with how we currently think social frailty is defined. Ultimately, Collinge, Bartolomucci, and Luciana argue that we may be conflating mortality risk with social frailty, and caution against construing the SFI-10 as a measure of social frailty. If social frailty is meant to capture changes in social behaviors and resources that put people at risk for adverse aging trajectories, then we need measures that reflect social behaviors and resources exclusively. Collinge and Luciana hope to develop such a measure that will better represent the construct and inform a holistic understanding of the aging process.
Collinge and Luciana also presented a poster comparing longitudinal trajectories of social frailty at the Intrinsic Capacity, Frailty, and Sarcopenia Research Conference this past March in Washington, DC.
Charlie Collinge, graduate student in the Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research (CSPR) area in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. Advised by Dr. Monica Luciana and part of the Brain and Behavioral Processes Laboratory.
Monica Luciana, PhD, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of Psychology, the director of the Brain and Behavioral Processes Laboratory, and a principal investigator in the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research (MCTFR) at the University of Minnesota.at the University of Minnesota.
