This ADAMHA RSA proposal requests fellowship support for a program of longitudinal research on mental health and social change in life-course perspective. In concept and research design, the research is comparative across time and place, contextual through the life course, and explanatory in focus. Data four the program will come from two U.S. longitudinal archives, the Oakland Growth Study (birth years, 1920-21) and the Berkeley Guidance Study (birth years, 1928-29) at the Institute of Human Development Berkeley; and from two longitudinal archives overseas, the Swedish Malmo study (birth year, 1982) and the Bonn Longitudinal Study (birth years, 1890-1910). Building upon life course studies, the research plan is organized around four specific objectives. Objective I focuses on the causal sequence of economic hardship, parent behavior, and life outcomes in two phases, Part I on the Berkeley cohort and generations and Part II on a comparative study of the Berkeley and Oakland cohorts (using newly developed parent measures from the Honzik-Main project at the Institute). Both parts of the analysis follow the same analytic sequence: 1) the effect of economic hardship on parent behavior during the 1930s, 2) specification of conditions that alter these effects, and 3) analysis of parent behavior as a link between family deprivation and life outcomes. The second objective concerns the life-span and health effects of military service in the lives of men (Oakland, Berkeley) who were born in the 1920s; and their relation to older offspring in the Vietnam era. Life outcomes include events in the transition to adulthood, marital stability and quality of social support, education and employment stability, and psychological health. Objective III focuses on the life course and mental health of a generation that serves as background for the Oakland and Berkeley cohorts; the Berkeley parents who were born around 1900. The hardship experience of these men and women will be traced to longevity and family support; and then compared with the hardship experience and consequences in the Bonn Longitudinal Study. Objective IV broadens the comparative scope to Sweden and a series of analyses of Depression hardship and adult health ((physical, psychological) in the Malmo Longitudinal sample and in the Berkeley cohort. The comparative design across all problem areas will use such statistical techniques as analysis of covariance and model fitting through the multiple group option of LISREL. Professional growth opportunities are linked to the cross-national research and to related collaboration across disciplinary lines.
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