Social Environment and Cognitive Health in Urban and Rural Areas: an introduction

This issue is designed to bring the gerontological community’s awareness to the Social Environment and Cognitive Health in Urban and Rural Areas (SECHURA) study and to encourage future use beyond the original team of investigators. SECHURA is a state representative panel study of 510 adults aged 55 years and above living across 41 geographically diverse counties in Indiana. This issue outlines the research design and several key results from Wave 1 (W1). Collected between November 2023 and March 2024, this wave gathered a range of data on the cognitive function of participants as well as in-depth accounts of their social interactions, relationships, and networks, the activities in which they engage throughout daily life, and the places these activities transpire. The social environment aspect of SECHURA is designed to be inherently multilevel in that it views participants as simultaneously occupying macro-level environments (communities), meso-level environments (personal networks), and micro-level environments (momentary social interactions), all of which cumulatively contribute to the cognitive aging process (Finlay et al., 2022; Hicken et al., 2026; Perry et al., 2022a; Zhaoyang et al., 2021).