Brodie Sakakibara won the poster presentation award at the recent Canadian Association of Gerontology’s 42nd annual education and scientific meeting (Oct. 18-19) in Halifax.
The poster titled “The influence of self-efficacy with using a wheelchair on life-space mobility in older, community-dwelling manual wheelchair-users” presented research Dr Sakakibara conducted with Dr. Bill Miller. His research investigated the direct effect of self-efficacy with wheelchair use on life-space mobility, and the mediating effect of wheelchair skills. The results showed that after controlling for important confounding variables, self-efficacy remained a statistically significant predictor of life-space mobility, and that wheelchair skills had a large, statistically significant mediating effect. It was concluded that interventions targeted toward improving self-efficacy may lead to improvements in both wheelchair skills and life-space mobility, and that research is needed on the effect of efficacy-enhancing strategies on mobility of older, community-dwelling wheelchair-users.