Addressing the Needs of Older Adults-Being as “Data-driven” as possible

This year (2019), Silver Moonshots (with the nonprofit HARC) produced a 320-page report focused on the 153, 277 adults of 50 years or older based in the Coachella Valley (CV) in California. In this brief article we want to discuss why this is not only rich data but why the CV is such a wonderful microcosm for wider communities to start to think about the issues and challenges facing older adults and their many unmet needs.

Conducting a robust survey always needs a sound strategy and in this case the survey strategy was based on 2, 532, telephone interviews of 30 minutes in length (of which 2, 022 were adults). Individuals were asked over 150 questions during this call. Once data collection was complete, statisticians weighted the sample data to most accurately represent the entire population living in the Coachella Valley. The post-stratification data was weighted based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey’s 5-Year estimates and applied to age, sex, race, and ethnicity.

This resultant report is very long and data heavy, containing both data tables and charts which provide information on a wide variety of issues which present the data in both 5 year age brackets (after 50 years of age) and in 10 year age brackets after 50. We hope you find the information in this report both rich and interesting and find data, which reveals a real opportunity to innovate or perhaps apply technology to improve a situation or make life easier or better for a population of people.

For example, what opportunities are presented when we know that 15.2% of people in the CV (nearly 7,000 in number) between the ages of 60 and 69 are acting as a caregiver?  But, in addition to thinking about this locally, we can also start to think about this data on a wider scale when we extrapolate it. This may be to the whole of California or even to the whole of the US, for example.

In order to do this we can look at the data in the Coachella Valley, alongside the data we have available for people of 50 year and older in both California and the US, both by the same age brackets and overall. As the table below illustrates our 153,277 people in the CV is dwarfed by the same population set in California of over 12 million (which is a total of 81 times the size) and even more dwarfed by the equivalent US population set of over 110 million (which is 722 times the size).

Given the above example of caregivers, because there are 3.9 million people in their 60’s in California and 35.2 million in the whole of the US this extrapolates to 562,626 people in California and over 5 million across the US who are caregivers in their 60’s. That’s a large population of people that may have very different needs to younger (or even older) caregivers and with different pressures or preferences.

As a simple step, any report reader can extrapolate this local data, on a simple linear basis, to arrive at an equivalent population of adults of 50 and above by using the 81 times multiplier for California and the 722 times multiplier for the whole of the US. By simply multiplying a population data set in this report by these numbers this gives a quick idea of statewide and national scale. Of course, these are simple linear extrapolations and not a substitute for actual data, but they are helpful nonetheless.

Finally, this is naturally only one large scale simple “cut” of a big data set and the opportunity exists to get much more ‘granular’ by asking other questions which “dig in” deeper. For example, we might ask questions such as “how many females between the ages of 70 and 79 are there that have both diabetes and a stroke?” or “how many ‘LGBTQ category’ males with a college education live alone at age 60 to 80?” These and other questions like it, allow us to understand how many people experience these issues and challenges and then perhaps go further by engaging in further polling, written surveys, focus groups or even co-creation sessions when we are looking to develop new products and services which could help a lot of people at scale. Of course, we need to frame these questions carefully first and then look into the data to see what new insights might be revealed. This is what Silver Moonshots is set up to help do and assist every interested individual or group to be as “data-driven” as possible.

Jon Warner is CEO of Silver Moonshots-www.SilverMoonshots.org, a research and mentoring organization for enterprises interested in the 50+ older adult markets. He is also Chapter Ambassador for Aging 2.0 in Los Angeles and Co-chair of the SBSS “Aging in the Future” conference, in Los Angeles.