QuantDev Brownbag - What makes older adults feel loved?: A Cultural Consensus Theory approach for modeling agreement across people

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What makes older adults feel loved?: A Cultural Consensus Theory approach for modeling agreement across people

Abstract: 

What makes older adults feel loved in daily life? Is there agreement among them? Previous literature has explored social well-being through measuring the frequency of feeling loved among older adults, yet the actual expressions of love in daily life have not been explored. To study this, we asked a representative US sample of 394 adults aged over 65 to judge 61 scenarios in which people might feel loved. We applied the Extended Condorcet Model to uncover the cultural consensus on these scenarios and found that there was an agreement on them. We also estimated item difficulties as well as person- and group-level parameters of guessing tendencies and knowledge levels. In addition, we explored sources of individual differences among the person-level parameters by regressing them on covariates such as sex, age, compassion, and loneliness. Results showed that participants with higher levels of compassion tended to know the consensus on daily life love scenarios better.