| Popis: |
With the growing population of older adults, we are facing unprecedented levels of age-related health problems, including Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias. In addition, older adults—and especially those suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease—are frequently the targets of financial exploitation (Lichtenberg, 2016). Fraud and financial abuse yield annual losses of nearly $3 billion with the vast majority of cases being perpetrated by strangers (51%) or friends and family (34%) (Roberto & Teaster, 2011). Yet, very little is known about how older adults integrate information from the social domain to inform economic decision making. To address this gap, we will assess social decision-making skills with two games from the behavioral economics literature that probe trust and fairness. We will also build off prior work that has suggested that victims of financial exploitation are often from low socioeconomic status groups (Choi & Mayer, 2000), have poorer cognitive functioning (James, Boyle, & Bennett, 2014), have more severe depression (Butters et al., 2008; Dotson, Beydoun, & Zonderman, 2010), and are more socially withdrawn (Choi & Mayer, 2000; Kuiper et al., 2015) by collecting information on these variables as well. In our prior work, we assessed the correlates of financial susceptibility in older adults around the Philadelphia, PA metropolitan area (10.17605/OSF.IO/FCRUS). Here, we administer a similar survey to replicate and extend our prior work in three key ways: 1) We broaden our participant base to citizens across the state of Pennsylvania in order to increase the diversity of our sample; 2) To replicate our prior work, we administer questionnaires identified in our first survey as significantly associated with financial susceptibility; and 3) we also asked questions to assess social, psychological, economic impacts related to COVID19. Thus the new survey includes self-report measures of financial exploitation, gullibility, social support, cognition, and health (see Measures). We will also continue to include hypothetical questions from the Ultimatum Game and the Trust Game to assess social preferences for fairness and trust. Survey responses will be collected from a Qualtrics integrated panel of 375 adults, aged 50 years and older. Our survey will continue to include questions aimed at gaining insight into personal finances and socioeconomic status. As with our prior submission, we will include questions to assess other sociodemographic variables (e.g., ethnicity, marital status, social network) and family history of Alzheimer’s Disease. Our primary analyses will aim to replicate our core findings from our first study while addressing two overarching research questions. First, which variables are associated with self-reported fraud? Second, are the links between sociodemographic factors (e.g., SES, health, etc.) and self-reported fraud moderated by other variables tied to social preferences, gullibility, social support, emotion regulation, and cognitive abilities? Our exploratory analyses will examine whether and how perceptions of COVID-19 are linked to fraud. Understanding how fraud is related to these variables in our survey will be a first step toward developing novel interventions that mitigate risk of financial exploitation in vulnerable groups and understand possible state-level interventions. |
