Research concerned with age and work activities is an important area of investigation since the workforce is aging and there are increasing concerns regarding economic dependency as well as predicted labor shortages for certain occupations. The available literature on aging and work is limited especially for present day jobs. The proposed study is concerned with age and work within the context of computer based jobs. It is a follow-up study to work recently completed by the Principal Investigators. The initial study examined the impact of age, and pacing on the performance of three computer tasks (a data entry task, file modification task, and inventory management task). Sixty five subjects ranging in age from 25 to 70 years participated. The results indicated that prior experience and age were significant predictors of performance variability. The older subjects had significantly longer response times and committed more errors than the younger subjects. The also experienced greater fatigue and task difficulty. The goal of the proposed project, is to identify the source of the age-related performance differences and to develop job redesign strategies to enhance the performance of older adults. The research will be conducted in three phases. The first phase will be an investigation of three real world computer tasks, the locus of age performance differences, and the relationship between age, performance and experience. The tasks will include a data entry task, a database query/update task and an inventory management task and will be simulations of actual jobs. The results from this study will be used to develop redesign guidelines for each of the three tasks which will be tested in an intervention study. Finally, the guidelines will be implemented in actual work setting (Ryder Systems, Prudential Health Care and IBM) and evaluated with respect to improving the performance, workload and satisfaction of workers of all ages.
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