Mapping Social Wellness Among Older Adults in Chicago Highlights Community Strengths
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October 2026
NORC developed an interactive map of older adults’ social well-being, providing unprecedented access to actionable community-level data.
A new publicly accessible, interactive map provides insights into the community features that drive social wellness among adults ages 55 and older across Chicago’s 77 distinct neighborhoods.
Social wellness is the sense of feeling connected with others and part of a community. The social wellness map project between NORC at the University of Chicago and the Mather Institute leveraged NORC’s survey and methodological expertise to yield high-quality, representative survey data from this hard-to-reach population. The team then built the map using the survey data, insights from Mather, and local and national administrative data.
The result is a tool that allows both individuals and local leaders to explore what’s driving older adult social wellness in their community. Users can make side-by-side neighborhood comparisons to see how their community stacks up to others, where they might be falling short, and other communities’ successes they could emulate
“We created an interactive tool that is inviting people to do their own data exploration,” said Peter Herman, a senior research methodologist in Methodology & Quantitative Social Sciences. “It democratizes the data and provides immediate access to those interested in making local change to improve social wellness among older adults in their community.”
“We created an interactive tool that is inviting people to do their own data exploration. It democratizes the data and provides immediate access to those interested in making local change to improve social wellness among older adults in their community.”
The new community connectability score reveals what drives a sense of connection with others and the community.
NORC and the Mather Institute developed a new, rigorous measure to assess social wellness among adults 55 and over in each neighborhood. There is a growing body of social connectedness research and separate research on how neighborhood amenities impact health or mobility, but there was no tool that could look at how all these factors together affect social well-being in older people.
So we created the community connectability score, which integrates both structural and social factors that contribute to social wellness among older adults. These factors include walkability, local gathering places, green space, safety and perceived disorder, and the depth of community ties as measured by factors such as resident turnover and length of residency.
“We developed the community connectability score by scaling up individuals’ survey responses and linking them with administrative data to the community level,” said Joshua Lerner, a senior research methodologist in Methodology & Quantitative Social Sciences. “The idea was that community connectability captures what makes respondents feel connected to everything around them and where local conditions make community connections stronger or weaker.”
“Community connectability captures what makes respondents feel connected to everything around them and where local conditions make community connections stronger or weaker.”
Gathering the data was a challenge.
Chicago neighborhoods vary widely in size, and available administrative data—crime rates, business locations, and transit access—aren’t reported by neighborhood boundaries, Herman noted. They are reported by ZIP codes and other geographic units, requiring spatial analysis techniques to align them with Chicago’s neighborhoods.
In addition to the geographic complexity, we had to make the most of NORC’s “bread-and-butter” survey skills to reach the goal of 50 survey completions in the target age group in each of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. We used an address-based sample and targeted households with higher odds of having an individual in our target age group. We made multiple contacts via mail and offered both web- and phone-based options to participate. In two very small neighborhoods, Gage Park and Chicago Lawn, we combined survey responses on the map to reach the target.
Strong community ties and access to social opportunities are key components of community connectability.
In Chicago, neighborhoods that border each other can be extremely different socially, Herman noted, and the map reveals some of those stark contrasts. Amenities vary widely across communities.
“The map allows organizations to identify gaps in their neighborhoods,” Lerner explained. “If the map indicates a community has low connectability, an organization can do a side-by-side comparison with a similar community with high connectability to look for what they might be missing or identify successful mitigation strategies.”
This article is from our flagship newsletter, NORC Now. NORC Now keeps you informed of the full breadth of NORC’s work, the questions we help our clients answer, and the issues we help them address.
