I participated in my first conference symposium this afternoon! The topic was late life suicide. Four students from West Virginia University and I presented research in this area. Marnin Heisel, PhD, an assistant professor at The University of Western Ontario, was the discussant and did an excellent job of integrating our research findings and linking them to previous late life suicide research.
For my GSA poster this year, we analyzed the psychometric properties of the COPE scale in older adults. The scale, developed by Carver, Scheier, and Weintraub (1989), measures dispositional coping strategies. We used the COPE in my thesis project and wanted to find out more about how the scale performs in community-dwelling older adults. We found strong evidence for internal reliability and modest evidence for validity in this population (see attachments for further information).
Today I attended the Innovations in Aging Summit, held in downtown Colorado Springs. The main goals of the summit were to "start a community conversation on how to make Colorado Springs a remarkable place to age" and to "lay groundwork for building a desired blueprint for aging in our community."
I'm in Atlanta, GA this week-end for the annual Gerontological Society of America conference. All the presentations I've seen so far have been fantastic.
Today marked the end of the fifth and final Aging and Mental Health Conference, hosted by the Gerontology Center at UCCS. The topic of this year's conference was "Integrated Health Care for Older Adults." The conference co-chairs were Sara Honn Qualls, Ph.D. and Deborah King, Ph.D. of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, NY.
The topic of this year's National Clinical Geropsychology Conference, hosted by the Gerontology Center at UCCS, was "End-of-Life Care and Bereavement." The conference co-chairs were Sara Honn Qualls, PhD and Julia Kasl-Godley, PhD. The keynote speaker, Shirley Otis-Green, MSW, spoke about "Building Your Legacy: Making Time Count," and urged the audience to consider what we can do now to influence our professional and personal legacy.
