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

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2447
igaa057.2447
Abstracts
Session 6155 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
University-Community Partnerships to Develop a Mutually Beneficial Tool to Measure Age-Friendly Collaboration
Pestine-Stevens Althea 1 Greenfield Emily 2 1 
Rutgers–New Brunswick, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States
2 
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 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”698 698
© 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
Age-friendly community initiatives (AFCIs) are frequently described as community collaborations; the AARP program model encourages diverse stakeholder engagement to achieve its aims of improving the social and built environments for long lives. However, little is known empirically about how AFCIs function as collaborations and how these relationships and activities lead to community changes. This paper presents how we developed a social network analysis tool to measure collaboration in AFCIs, which emerged from multi-year, university-community partnerships on AFCIs in western New York and northern New Jersey. Iterative processes, including inductive analysis of qualitative interviews and facilitated meetings with local AFCI work-groups, provided opportunities to create survey items on collaboration with meaning specific to AFCIs. We describe this tool’s application as part of a survey of AFCI stakeholders, demonstrating how findings contribute both to advancing knowledge on AFCIs in general and directly informing the efforts of AFCI actors on the ground.