Outlooks for the future in independently living older Australians

To explore outlooks for the future which exist in an older population, through construction of a typology of combinations of absence or presence of reported hopes and fears for the future and a detailed analysis of the characteristics of older people in each of the four outlook categories created: optimistic, pessimistic, realistic or detached.

The findings are based on population survey responses from 8881 older Australians (65 + yr) living independently in the community. The Cochrane-Armitage test was used to detect the presence of trends, while logistic regression modelling was used to examine predictors of respondents expressing no main hope and/or no main fear.

The logistic regression modelling identified predictors of outlook category, which have face validity and are consistent with the literature. In addition, the proportion of older people in the pessimistic category with scores indicating psychological distress (Kessler 6) was significantly higher than in the three other categories, providing support for the validity of the typology.

The vast majority of independently living older Australians have realistic or optimistic outlooks about their future. The small minority who are pessimistic, and more likely to be experiencing psychological distress, can be identified through self-reported absence of hopes accompanied by presence of fears.