Safiyyah Okoye
Drexel University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
More than 15 million older adults have trouble with self-care, housework or getting around, which is called functional disability. Lower-income older adults are affected more often.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
housing disrepair
housing quality
functional disability
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Characterize housing disrepair, such as roof, wall, heating or plumbing problems, among U.S. older adults, and test its links to functional disability in low-income older adults.
- Test how housing disrepair relates to the emotional, physical and financial burden on family caregivers who help older adults with everyday tasks.
- Use qualitative methods within the mixed-methods design to describe the daily functioning of low-income older adults and their caregivers living with disrepair, including barriers to home repair and preferences for fixing it.
More about the research
Functional disability raises healthcare costs, lowers quality of life and puts emotional, physical and financial strain on the family members who help. Homes play a known role in disability. Yet housing disrepair, such as a damaged roof or walls or broken heating or plumbing, has rarely been studied as a cause of these income gaps. Because disrepair can be fixed, it is a possible target for interventions.
Why it matters
Housing disrepair can be fixed. If it helps drive disability among low-income older adults, home repair programs could become a way to slow disability, ease caregiver strain and narrow income-based health gaps. The findings are meant to lay the groundwork for designing such an intervention.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kimberly Rollings
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Build typologies of life course housing histories, combining housing assistance and multiple dimensions of housing insecurity, for midlife and older adults using longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics data.
Manka Nkimbeng
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Explore the experiences and care strategies of high-risk New American older adults with dementia and their informal family caregivers.
Kalisha Johnson
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Examine how behavioral, sociocultural and environmental factors shape formal care decisions and quality of life among African American people living with dementia and their adult daughter caregivers, using dyadic data analysis.
The school
Drexel University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $170M a year on research, 282 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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