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

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2582
igaa057.2582
Abstracts
Session 6300 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Older Latinx and African Americans’ Experiences of Civic Participation
Reyes Laurent  
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Highland Park, New Jersey, 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”727 728
© 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
By 2030 Latinx and African Americans are expected to be the largest non-White groups of older adults. In the past 20 years, older adults’ civic participation has received considerable attention. However, until now most scholarship has focused on formal volunteerism and voting, activities that remain inaccessible to many marginalized groups. As a consequence, other civic activities are going unrecognized. The aim of this study is to understand how civic participation is experienced throughout the lives of 24 African American and Latinx adults 60+ living in New Jersey. Because civic participation is a concept that has many names and meanings depending on culture, language, and history I employ photo-elicitation techniques followed by in-depth interviews to understand civic participation through participants’ lens. Findings from this study can serve to improve conceptualizations and measurements of civic participation for future studies and inform efforts to strengthen civic participation among these populations. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Qualitative Research Interest Group.