The project focuses within a life course perspective on how major acute and chronic psychosocial stressors and resources for adapting to stress combine to affect health, productive activity, and effective functioning in middle and later life. Guided by results of our prior work and developments in the broader scientific literature, the project will focus on six aims: (1) understanding how the relation of age and aging to health is stratified by sex, race, and socioeconomic status (SES): (2) determining prospectively the absolute and relative impact on health and effective functioning of major potential psychosocial stressors and adaptive resources, including chronic and acute stress, social relationships and supports, self-efficacy, health behaviors, activity levels, and selected early life experiences; (3) determining prospectively the role of these psychosocial factors in explaining sex, race, and socioeconomic variations in the relations of age to health and functioning; (4) developing causal models of the relation of psychosocial factors to health in middle and later life, with special attention to the life course patterning of stress and relations between acute and chronic stress; (5) exploring the interrelations among health, productive activity (both paid and unpaid) and stress and adaptation over the life course, especially ways in which productive activity may mediate or moderate the relations among stratification, stress and health; and (6) engaging in selective methodological research to improve our methods for studying the above issues on longitudinal data.
The aims will be achieved primarily through analyses and existing two-wave national panel survey (ACL) and proposed extensions of it to a third wave. Special attention is focused on the use of three waves of data to address unresolved issues regarding: individual change with age; determination of short-and medium-term prospective impact of psychosocial factors on health; and distinguishing effects of stable or chronic patterns of psychosocial stress and adaptive resources from effects of such variables assessed at a single point in time.
