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	Tilburg Frailty Indicator	Expectations Regarding Aging Survey
Field	Social Gerontology	Social Gerontology
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	2010	2002
Originator	Robbert J. J. Gobbens and colleagues (Tilburg University)	Catherine A. Sarkisian and colleagues (UCLA)
Type	Self-report multidimensional frailty screening questionnaire	Self-report scale of expectations regarding aging
Seminal source	Gobbens, R. J. J., van Assen, M. A. L. M., Luijkx, K. G., Wijnen-Sponselee, M. T., & Schols, J. M. G. A. (2010). The Tilburg Frailty Indicator: Psychometric Properties. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 11(5), 344-355.	Sarkisian, C. A., Hays, R. D., Berry, S., & Mangione, C. M. (2002). Development, Reliability, and Validity of the Expectations Regarding Aging (ERA-38) Survey. The Gerontologist, 42(4), 534-542.
Aliases	TFI, Tilburg Frailty Index, Integral Frailty Self-Report, Multidimensional Frailty Questionnaire	ERA-38, ERA-12, Expectations Regarding Aging, Age Expectations Survey
Related	3	3
Summary	The Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI) is a self-report questionnaire that measures frailty in older adults across three domains — physical, psychological, and social. Developed by Robbert Gobbens and colleagues at Tilburg University and published in 2010, it operationalizes an explicit 'integral conceptual model of frailty' in which frailty is a dynamic state arising from losses in one or more functioning domains, itself driven by life-course determinants such as age, sex, multimorbidity, and life events. Part A of the instrument records these determinants; Part B comprises 15 items that sum to a 0–15 frailty score, with a cut point of 5 commonly used to flag frailty. Unlike purely physical phenotypes, the TFI deliberately incorporates psychological (mood, anxiety, coping, cognition) and social (living alone, social relationships, support) components, reflecting the social-gerontological view that frailty is more than a biomedical syndrome.	The Expectations Regarding Aging (ERA) Survey measures the degree to which an individual expects physical, mental, and cognitive functioning to decline as a normal and unavoidable part of growing older. Developed by Catherine Sarkisian and colleagues at UCLA, the original 38-item version (ERA-38, 2002) and the widely used 12-item short form (ERA-12, 2005) capture 'age expectations' — a self-perception-of-aging construct that predicts health behaviors and outcomes. Items are answered on a Likert scale and scored into three domain scores (expectations regarding physical health, mental health, and cognitive function) plus a total, conventionally rescaled to 0–100 where higher scores indicate higher (more positive) expectations. Low expectations — believing that decline is inevitable — are associated with less physical activity, lower help-seeking, and worse outcomes, making the ERA a key tool for studying how beliefs about aging shape behavior.