Abstract for: Causal Structures of Community Resilience: Interview-Based System Dynamics Modeling with African American Centenarians

African American centenarians have survived over a century despite structural racism, economic exclusion, and health disparities. Existing research catalogs protective factors (church networks, family support, faith coping) but does not model the dynamic feedback interactions among them. No published SD, GMB, or CBSD work has modeled centenarians as a distinct population, despite gerontology SD research on older adults, productive aging, and dementia risk. We apply interview-based causal loop diagramming, drawing on purposive text analysis (Kim and Andersen) and CLD combination methods (Cassidy et al., 2021). Individual CLDs are constructed from 12 in-depth video interviews with centenarians, with plans for individual member-check sessions and cross-case synthesis into a unified community resilience diagram. The synthesized CLD will serve as the structural foundation for a concept model in Stella Architect. Individual CLDs have been constructed for all 12 participants. Preliminary cross-case patterns include four recurring feedback loops: community reinforcement through church and family networks, adversity erosion through chronic discrimination, a faith-health pathway linking spirituality to health behaviors, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. The church emerged as a multi-functional structural node connecting several loops simultaneously. This work extends interview-based CLD methods to a population where traditional group model building is infeasible due to mobility, stamina, and geographic constraints. We seek feedback on how to conduct individual member-checking that preserves the participatory commitments of CBSD, and how to formalize a concept model when the structural foundation is qualitative and the available quantitative data operates at a different level of aggregation. AI transcription tools were used to generate initial interview transcripts