For 25 years, Mather Institute has expanded and deepened our understanding of aging and senior living, providing a critical research-based perspective on older adults and their preferences, behaviors and experiences.
The Evanston, Illinois-based institute is part of non-profit Mather, which operates four senior living communities in Illinois, Arizona and Virginia, and provides programs in the community-at-large in the Chicagoland area. Since the institute’s founding in 1999, the senior living field has changed dramatically, and Mather Institute has played a vital part in its evolution with sophisticated insights that have helped steer the development of practices and policies geared toward better serving older adults.
“Research provides a basis and foundation for action and for taking the best direction forward,” said Cate O’Brien, senior vice president of Mather Institute and Community Initiatives. “When you’re selecting programs or initiatives, being able to look to research helps you understand what the best practices are and what the potential barriers to implementing programs are. It’s a great advantage to be able to base your initiatives, programs and practices on research versus some kind of guesstimate of what might work best in the community.”
At its inception, the Mather Institute focused on Alzheimer’s disease and end-of-life issues, seeking grants to fund research in these focus areas. When Mary Leary arrived at the organization in 2002, she saw an opportunity to pursue wellness research and to help adults develop behaviors that support longevity.
“We were fortunate in being able to pursue research that may have been perceived at the time as being innovative,” said Leary, who serves as president and CEO of Mather. “There weren’t a lot of grants out there focused on wellness, but we received funding from Mather as part of its mission to create ways to age well.”
To date, Mather has conducted research-based education programs in all 50 states and 14 countries around the world, and its reports provide a richer understanding of the most important issues that face senior living today.
A Resource for the Industry
The Mather Institute’s research efforts create unique benefits for the Mather communities, in particular.
“What we’re finding is that residents who move to Mather senior living communities appreciate the research focus that Mather has in terms of identifying best practices to support older adults in aging well,” Leary said.
Still, although the institute is an especially invaluable resource for Mather communities, it has long shared its research with the wider industry, which has proved enthusiastic about the insights the organization provides. The institute’s research does not merely focus on findings but also features actionable recommendations that emerge from studies, offering a path forward for the field.
Leary said she believes the modern senior living industry as a whole “absolutely” prioritizes research – including studies from the institute – as the foundation for best practices in the field.
“We started out focusing Mather Institute on supporting Mather senior living communities, recognizing that our communities are living labs,” Leary said. “As we completed our research and developed programs, we found ourselves benefiting from these programs and had a desire to give back to the industry. So we’ve shared our research findings and programs, and I feel that the industry really has embraced the quality of the research that Mather has conducted and our programs that we have offered, all of which are complementary to others who are serving older adults.”
The Mather Institute shares its research in an array of avenues ranging from professional conferences and publications to social media and a website filled with reports and other insights. For instance, the institute offers a series of “Age Well” research-based tips on Facebook. A new series, “Next,” will focus on next practices related to wellness with an emphasis on trends that are finding their footing internationally.
As part of helping to encourage research and to disseminate it widely, Mather Institute established the Innovative Research on Aging Awards, which have fast become a prestigious honor. The institute invites researchers to submit recent research with important implications for aging well, and the awards attract submissions from around the world, including applicants from Turkey, Singapore and Australia most recently.
“It’s been great to get those perspectives and that research and then to work to bring it forward and share it with our industry,” O’Brien said.
Similarly, the institute started its Promising Practices Award program that identifies and recognizes other providers who are developing practices that show the potential to become “next and best” practices.
“I’ve heard of providers saying that getting this award from Mather is like receiving a gold medal in this industry,” Leary said.
Research Reports Capable of Changing Senior Living
Among the Mather Institute’s recent milestone reports is a new model for wellness in the senior living industry. For decades, many in the field have relied on the six dimensions of wellness model, which O’Brien said was critical to drawing attention to the fact that wellness is about more than just physical fitness. However, Mather Institute researchers believed a successful model needed to better recognize that wellness is not the same for everyone – “it’s personal, and each individual has different dimensions that are more important to them personally,” O’Brien said.
The result is the Person-Centric Wellness Model. The model, which Mather introduced in 2021, emphasizes three drivers of wellness: autonomy or control, which means having personal choice over your actions; affiliation, which focuses on connecting with others; and achievement or a sense of accomplishment or personal growth.
“We see these drivers as important as a foundation where wellness can flourish,” O’Brien said. “At the same time, the model recognizes that individual wellness doesn’t take place in a vacuum, but it’s influenced by social and cultural factors that can make it easier or harder to engage in wellness practices.”
O’Brien said the institute is seeing a lot of interest in its fresh model because it incorporates the uniqueness and diversity of individuals, and Mather communities use the model as a basis for a number of its programs. For instance, Mather’s wellness coaching gives residents individual and group experiences with coaches that allows them to identify their personal wellness goals based on the Person-Centric Wellness Model’s three drivers.
Leary said Mather residents immediately welcomed the new model.
“I think it is because it focuses on what’s most important to each person and recognizes that wellness will be different for everyone,” Leary said.
Another landmark study was the institute’s five-year Age Well study, which compared wellness outcomes in life plan communities with the community at large. A total of more than 8,200 residents from 122 Life Plan Communities from across the country took part in the longitudinal study.
“This is really the first time that this had been done on this level in this kind of comprehensive way,” O’Brien said. “And we found that residents of life plan communities reported better physical, emotional, intellectual, social and vocational wellness than their community-dwelling comparison group or counterparts. There were many other different findings from that five-year study, and it was very informative for our industry and for life plan community operators, leaders and potential residents.”
Other notable research efforts include the nation’s first study of adult children of older adults living in life plan communities. The study, which was conducted in 2012, has become a compass for what the next generation of older adults desire in potentially moving to a life plan community, Leary said. The institute also has embarked on an ongoing five-year study on Gen X to better understand their needs and desires related to retirement – a demographic that will be vital for the senior living field in the years ahead.
In partnership with researchers from Rush University and Northwestern University, the institute also developed the “Boost Your Brain and Memory” program to promote brain health among older adults. The program was adopted at communities across the country and related studies showed positive benefits improving healthy brain behavior. In addition, the institute has developed education programs for caregivers and an emergency preparedness education program for senior living communities. Both were adopted throughout the country.
Over the years, the Mather Institute has worked frequently with researchers at universities to combine the researchers’ particular areas of expertise with the institute’s intricate understanding of the senior living industry. Ongoing collaborations with university researchers include developing a program to support mindful eating with a researcher from Harvard University and working on a series on perceptions of aging among diverse groups of older adults with an academic from the University of Michigan.
Looking ahead, O’Brien said the Mather Institute has ambitious plans to develop new areas of research while further excavating existing ones.
“We’re looking to continue to grow our impact on the industry and to continue to engage in innovative research with practical application,” O’Brien said. “We’re looking at some larger initiatives, including working across areas of service and with community-based partners to form a coalition related to reducing loneliness in Chicagoland. And within that, there will be a series of research studies, including a new area that we’re interested in called social prescription, wherein health care providers are essentially prescribing cultural arts or other community-based programs to support well-being. We are also looking forward to developing a center for mindful aging, which would have a strong research component, as well as planning several additional studies. We’re excited for what’s next.”
