According to a recent study, elderly drivers who stop driving and have no transportation alternatives become less socially active and risk isolation. This can lead to a decline in both physical and mental health.
Teja Pristavec, a sociology researcher at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, sought to determine the effect of driving mobility on the social participation of older Americans. Her results were published online in May 2016 in The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences (available here).
Pristavec defines driving mobility as a combination of being able to drive oneself and receiving rides. She looked at driving habits and social activities of more than 4,300 adults over age 65, using survey data collected in 2011 and 2013 by the National Health and Aging Trends Study (www.nhats.org).
Compared to seniors who had stopped driving, she found that frequent drivers are more than three times more likely to visit friends and family, and almost three times as likely to participate in social outings like going to the movies. They were also more than twice as likely to attend religious services or organized group activities. But when they lost the ability to drive and had no transportation alternatives, their participation in social activities declined to the same level as those who never drove at all. A decrease in driving frequency, from frequent driving to occasional driving to not driving, lowers social participation.