Sojung Park

As an environmental gerontologist, Sojung Park studies how housing and neighborhood environments shape aging in place among older adults, with particular attention to those who are most vulnerable: those who are low-income, cognitively impaired, and living alone. Building on a person–environment fit framework, she conceptualizes aging in place not as a function of individual health or service supply alone, but as the outcome of a dynamic fit across the economic, service, social, and spatial dimensions of where older adults live.

A central thread of Park’s work concerns housing as a platform for healthy aging. Her longitudinal and review studies examine how subsidized and supportive senior housing relates to older residents’ health, cognitive function, support access, and well-being across the life course, showing, for example, how social engagement and neighborhood cohesion help explain the link between subsidized housing and cognitive function, and how community-based housing type shapes end-of-life resources and where older adults ultimately die.

A second thread turns to the neighborhood and community environment. Park investigates how the social, physical, and service characteristics of neighborhoods, including geographic access to local resources, enable or constrain support, participation, and aging in place. Her cross-national and cross-cultural studies compare age-friendly environments and community-based care arrangements across the United States and Korea, examining why supports and services that are available to some older adults remain inaccessible or unused for others.

Across this work, Park increasingly considers how housing and community settings can coordinate and connect older adults to support, pointing toward community-based models of care that strengthen equitable aging in place.

Current Work

Park’s current work extends this research program in two directions. The first is a book project on alternative housing communities in Korea, grounded in direct site visits and interviews. Following people across the life course (young adults in housing cooperatives, older adults in cohousing and care-oriented housing, identity-based communities, and village- and neighborhood-anchored housing), the project asks when living together becomes solidarity and when it becomes a survival strategy, how care is distributed, and whether such communities supplement public systems or quietly absorb what those systems leave undone. Anchored in frameworks of the social reproduction of housing, the solidarity of precarity, and housing as commons, it brings a qualitative, place-based lens to the same questions Park studies quantitatively in the United States, and lays the groundwork for forthcoming English-language scholarship.

The second extends Park’s person–environment fit framework to aging with and into disability. This emerging line of work examines how middle-aged and older adults with disabilities experience fit and misfit across the multiple domains of their environments, with particular attention to the service divide between aging-services and disability-services systems, where eligibility rules, institutional missions, and categorical classifications can leave people fully served by neither. A scoping review and a complementary qualitative study consider how this divide is experienced differently depending on disability timing, that is, by those aging with a long-standing disability versus those aging into disability in later life.

In Brown School News