This ADAMHA RSA proposal requests renewal of support for a program of longitudinal research on mental health and social change in life-course perspective. In concept and design, the research is comparative acroSS time and place, contextual over the life course, and explanatory in focus. Data for the program will come from seven archives with life record data, prospective and retrospective: the Oakland Growth Study (birth years, 1920-21), the Berkeley Guidance Study (birth years, 1928-29), the Iowa Youth and Families Project (launched in 1988), the Lewis Terman Study (birth years, 1904-1920), the Grant Study of Harvard men (birth years, circa 1920), the Legacies of Vietnam Survey of 1976, and the National Vietnam Readjustment Survey of 1986. Building upon a life course framework, the research plan is organized around three objectives and their expression in core projects for the five-year span. Objective I focuses on an investigation of the life-course effects of two social changes on mental health, socioeconomic deprivation (including Depression hardship, and contemporary rural deprivation) and military mobilization (during WW War II and Vietnam, in particular). Analysis of these effects will take into account the resources and experience that people bring to the new situation and stressor. Objective 2 directs inquiry to the linkages and mechanisms by which social change influences the life course and the effect persists or fades across the life span. Objective 3 includes research that tests the generalizability of empirical observations across different times, places and samples. These objectives are expressed in the core research projects. The first project, called surmounting childhood disadvantage, examines the process by which men and women from the Depression era managed to rise above their family limitations. Using data from the Oakland and Berkeley studies, the analysis evaluates and compares the bridging role of military service, higher education, and marriage. The second project turns to a contemporary expression of hardship, economic deprivation in the midwest, and investigates the influence of family hardship on social relationships, personalities, and the welfare of children in a five-year Iowa panel study of youth and families. Building on the Depression research, this project views family adaptations to economic pressures as a link between economic change and the life experience of children. The third project investigates the life-course effects of military mobilization during WW 11 and compares these outcomes with effects observed among Vietnam veterans. The comparative design across problem areas will use statistical techniques such as multiple regression, analysis of covariance, and model fitting through the multiple-group option of LISREL.
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