Alyssa Goldman
Boston College, MA·Social Science·Early-career
Staying socially connected is linked to better health and longer life. Yet little is known about how social lives change as people near the end of life, or how social context relates to memory decline and dementia.
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
social engagement
social networks
end of life
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Estimate how personal social networks and social activities like volunteering change during the final five years of life, using growth curve models on National Health and Aging Trends Study data.
- Test how forms of social engagement relate to physical, cognitive and psychological well-being and last-month healthcare quality before death, using regression and cross-lagged panel models.
- Compare end-of-life social engagement trajectories between older adults with and without dementia or physical functional impairment.
- Determine how changes in proximal social complexity, such as networks and activities, and distal complexity, such as neighborhoods, together shape cognitive decline and ADRD in older adults.
- Test whether olfaction (sense of smell) and inflammation help explain links between social complexity and cognition, in a nationally representative longitudinal sample of older adults.
More about the research
Two projects use large national survey data on older Americans to ask how social ties, social activities and neighborhoods shape well-being, cognition and the end-of-life experience. Both pay close attention to people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD).
Why it matters
The number of Americans who die with dementia is projected to more than double in thirty years. Also, U.S. end-of-life care ranks below many peer countries. This work could point to social interventions that improve quality of life before death for older adults, including those with dementia. It could also ease burdens on families and caregivers, and suggest ways to slow cognitive decline.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adam Roth
Oklahoma State University, OK·Social Science
Characterize the daily social interactions and activities of older adults in rural and urban areas, using surveys and ecological momentary assessments, which are brief repeated check-ins during everyday life.
Laura B Zahodne
University of Michigan, MI·Psychology
Follow MCAP participants for a third assessment and expand the cohort, then use latent growth curve modeling to test whether neighborhood socioeconomic status predicts differences in cognitive decline between Black and White older adults.
Olga Jarrín Montaner
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Public Health & Epidemiology
Harmonize and merge multiple datasets into a repository of aging trajectories linking care settings, geriatric syndromes and physical function to patient, community, health-system and environmental risk factors such as air pollution.
The school
Boston College: 11 labs on PI Pages, $96M a year on research, 161 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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