The fundamental goal of this Program of four projects remains that of the National Research Plan on Aging: """"""""to promote (both individual and societal health and well-being by extending the vigorous and productive years of life."""""""" To that end we have generated national and local survey assessments of a broad range of indicators of both health and paid and unpaid productiv activity in middle and later life and their major psychosocial determinants Renewal of this project for three years is requested to realize fully our original goals, especially in regard to causal analysis, and to move beyond our original goals conceptually, empirically, and methodologically. This renewal seeks: (1) to focus the projects on maintaining and accelerating analysis and publications of existing data; (2) to collect by telephone a brief third wave interview (in 1991) with our already established representative national panel sample of 3,617 adults aged 25+ i 1986; (3) to continue ongoing mortality ascertainment on this panel, and to increase efforts to track and study nonrespondents; and (4) to continue identifying, and interviewing widows and associated controls in our prospective study of widowhood in a representative sample of 1,532 members of married couples in the Detroit area. We are independently seeking continued support from the MacArthur Foundation for collection of biomedica data on our Detroit sample, providing unique opportunities to study the relation between psychosocial and biomedical functioning in later life. Having established two substantial data bases in the first several years of the project, and an increasingly productive line of analyses over the last two years, maintaining our analysis momentum is critical to fully realize the potential of our prior work. Extending our national longitudinal panel to three time points over 5.0 years will allow, at modest cost, much more adequate data on the causal relations between activity and health and the causal impact of psychosocial stress and adaptive resources on health and productive activity. Continuation of the prospective study of widowhood is essential realizing its original goal of understanding how psychosocial, an now also biomedical factors, affect adaptation to this prevalent and severe late life stressor.
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