Aged Communities and Political Knowledge

Abstract

Past work emphasizes the decline of cognition into older age. Recent work suggests that living in an aged community provides ample opportunity for social interaction with peers and that these older residents perform better cognitively than more isolated seniors. I test whether this relationship is evident for the political cognition of older residents with NAES data from 2000 and 2004. Findings indicate higher levels of political knowledge among seniors living in aged communities compared with their peers living in places without the same social context.