Investigating Social Support and Compensation Mediators for Subjective Cognition and Community Participation

It is crucial to investigate factors that alleviate the negative association between subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and community participation to identify intervention targets for facilitating community participation in aging adults. This study aimed to investigate whether social support and compensatory strategy use mediate the association between SCD and community participation. This is a cross-sectional study with 93 community-dwelling aging adults. The data was collected using a survey method. We tested two individual regression-based mediation models with social support and compensatory strategy use as mediators. Social support (Indirect effect β = -0.097, 98% confidence interval = -4.481 to -0.651), but not compensatory strategy use (p > .05), partially mediated the association between SCD and community participation. Occupational therapy practitioners may wish to address social support to reduce the negative association between SCD and community participation in aging adults. Additional studies are required to recommend compensatory strategy use to mitigate the negative association between SCD and community participation.