We seek funding to conduct detailed analyses of the life histories and mental statuses of the members of The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), which includes over 9000 American men and women who were first interviewed as high school seniors in 1957 and have been reinterviewed in 1964, 1974, and 1992-3. Data have been collected on family background, starting resources, academic abilities, youthful aspirations, adult educational and occupational achievement, work events and conditions, family events, social support, social Comparisons, physical and mental health. We distinguish among four mental health categories: Depressed/Unwell (those with prior episode(s) of serious depression who also lack high psychological well-being), Healthy (high psychological well-being and no history of serious depression, Vulnerable (no history depression but low profiles of psychological well-being, and Resilient (prior episode(s) depression and high current well-being). Life history data of these groups are organized according to five theoretical concepts: cumulative exposure to adversity (events and chronic conditions), cumulative exposure to advantage (events and conditions), psychological reactions to adversity and advantage, cross-time positions in social hierarchies across life domains, and quality of social relationships. The overarching hypothesis is that life histories of the four mental health groups, and subgroups within them, are distinguished by particular combinations of adversity, advantage, reactions, social hierarchies, an social relationships, as experienced in diverse life domains through time. Key analytic objectives are to develop quantitative characterizations of life histories associated with each mental health category and test them for distinguishability. Five steps comprise the process of specification and testing of the admissible abstracted chronological representations (AACRs) of each group. These steps, involving a progression from the analysis of individual biographies to the formulation of generic histories, are illustrated with preliminary data on resilient women.
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