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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.1422
igaa057.1422
Abstracts
Session 2963 (Poster)
Environment and Aging (BSS)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
What’s Age Have to Do With Comfortableness in Seeking and Providing Social Support After a Disaster?
Phillips Judith Robertson  Jimenez Edith  
California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, California, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”440 440
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Disasters are associated with loss of property and loss of psychological well-being. Receiving various types of social support, such as emotional or tangible support, from various sources, such as family or friends, have been found to reduce the adverse impact of a disaster on affected adult community residents. It is not well studied, though, why some adults will not seek or provide support after a disaster while other adults will. The purpose of this study was to explore how age might play a role in how comfortable adults were in seeking social support from others and how age might play a role in how comfortable adults were in providing social support to others after a disaster, the 2014 San Diego County, CA wildfires. One hundred and twenty-two community residents (18 to 80 years) were recruited with 33 adults identified as Secondary Disaster Survivors and 89 adults identified as Non-Victims. Analyses revealed that age did play a role in Secondary Survivors’ comfortableness in seeking support from others; Older Adults (50-80) were significantly less likely than Middle-aged Adults (30-49) to feel comfortable in seeking support. There was no significant comfortableness difference between Middle-aged and Younger Adults (18-29) in seeking support. There were no age group differences in comfortableness in providing support to others for Secondary Survivors and Non-Victims. Implications from this data suggest that local disaster organizations should actively support affected older adults post-disaster while also including unaffected adults of all ages in the process of providing support to those in need.