W8 – How not to get lost in Translation? Building a Shared Language of Resilience in Gerontology and Geriatrics with the SSRO Framework

Agenda

In a globalised world, ageing well depends on preserving resilience, the ability to resist, recover from, or adapt to health-related stressors, amid both context-specific disease burdens and shared global challenges such as pandemics. Yet in both research and clinical practice, its meaning and application remain inconsistently defined across health disciplines, hindering the development of knowledge and the implementation of resilience assessment and management in gerontology and geriatrics. To address this gap, we recently developed a generic resilience framework – the SSRO framework – which specifies four core elements for studying resilience: the Stressor, the System under study, the Resilience resources and mechanisms, and the Outcomes of interest. This symposium will introduce the framework and related methodologies to study resilience. We illustrate them with empirical examples, and provide participants with a hands-on opportunity to apply these to their own research questions. The session will foster a shared language for resilience research and highlight challenges for future refinement.

Objectives

• Participants will develop a deeper understanding of resilience research by critically engaging with the SSRO framework and research methodologies for resilience study. They will explore the nuances of each element and learn how these can be defined, operationalised, and applied consistently in gerontology and geriatrics to strengthen conceptual clarity and comparability across studies.
• Participants will apply the SSRO framework to their own research examples in small groups. Through short peer exchanges within these teams and final presentations from selected participants, followed by structured feedback, they will refine their applications and recognise how a shared framework strengthens comparability, collaboration, and translation across global contexts.

Speakers

• Dr Kaisa Koivunen, postdoctoral researcher, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
• Dr Ravi Deepak Kumar, postdoctoral researcher, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Dr Almar Kok, associate professor, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands
• Dr René Melis, assistant professor, Radboudumc, The Netherlands