Older Adult Telemarketing Fraud Assessment

Older adults throughout the United States experience telemarketing fraud each year. Older adults are significantly impacted after being victimized and likely will be unable to recover both financially and psychologically. There is a need to identify common telemarketing strategies, characteristics that make older adults vulnerable to telemarketing fraud and an effective intervention to ensure that older adults do not continue to be victimized. Currently no research has been completed to address these concerns. The goal of this research project is to answer the question of how to determine what constructs are important to include while creating an assessment to test older adult's telemarketing knowledge. The assessment created is called the Older Adult Telemarketing Fraud Assessment or OATFA. The OATFA will determine an effective way to measure older adults' knowledge in recognizing, handling and reporting telemarketing fraud. The OATFA will be distributed to older adults who utilize the services of the Central Wyoming Senior Center and the Laramie County Senior Services. The OATFA will be handed out along with three other questionnaires that include the SKEP, SVS and Rosenberg's Self-Esteem scales. The correlation between these questionnaires and assessments will be analyzed to develop a psychometrically sound instrument to measure older adults' knowledge on telemarketing fraud.