Social and emotional support (SaES) is essential for older adult mental health and is shaped by individual-level factors and the built environment. However, much of the focus on the built environment, and specifically social infrastructure—the physical places that facilitate social interaction and social tie formation—relies heavily on urban settings or samples with limited diversity. Consequently, there is little understanding if social infrastructure matters for the SaES of older adults in rural America, and across race and ethnicity. Therefore, we use social cohesion as a conceptual lens and the community gerontology framework to determine whether availability of social infrastructure is associated with SaES among older adults in rural America and whether this relationship varies across race and ethnicity. Using data from 110,850 rural older adults from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System and data from the National Neighborhood Data Archive, we show that among rural ethnoracial minority older adults, higher densities of social infrastructure are associated with higher SaES. This is not true for rural non-Hispanic White older adults. Results highlight the importance of accounting for both social infrastructure as part of the built environment and heterogeneity across race and ethnicity in studies that examine older adult mental and emotional health.

中文翻译：

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农村老年人的建成环境与社会情感支持：以社会基础设施和关注民族差异为例☆

社会和情感支持（SaES）对于老年人的心理健康至关重要，并受到个人因素和建筑环境的影响。然而，对建筑环境的大部分关注，特别是社会基础设施——促进社会互动和社会关系形成的物理场所——在很大程度上依赖于城市环境或多样性有限的样本。因此，人们很少了解社会基础设施是否对美国农村地区、跨种族和民族的老年人的 SaES 很重要。因此，我们使用社会凝聚力作为概念镜头和社区老年学框架来确定社会基础设施的可用性是否与美国农村老年人的 SaES 相关，以及这种关系是否因种族和民族而异。利用来自行为风险因素监测系统的 110,850 名农村老年人的数据和国家邻里数据档案馆的数据，我们发现，在农村少数民族老年人中，较高的社会基础设施密度与较高的 SaES 相关。对于农村非西班牙裔白人老年人来说，情况并非如此。结果强调了在检查老年人心理和情绪健康的研究中考虑社会基础设施作为建筑环境的一部分以及跨种族和族裔异质性的重要性。