The proposed research would continue to study the effects of natural disaster on the mental health of older adults. Whereas the current project has focused on the direct and indirect effects of natural disaster, the continuation project would study those factors that may moderate (enhance or buffer) those effects. Three categories of moderators would be studied: (1) pre-existing psychological and physical symptoms; 92) resources of the individual, such as social support, coping strategies, and past experience; and (3) the community context, i.e., the capacity of the community to respond to crisis. An important feature of the proposed research is its consideration of both individual and collective properties of the disaster and its context. The current project is studying the effects of """"""""community destruction"""""""", using measures collected from administrative records, as well as the effects of """"""""personal loss"""""""", using measures collected from respondents. The proposed project would extend this work by examining the role of community-level resources in determining disaster impact as well as the role of individual-level resources. Measures of the community context would be collected as part of the proposed project from state records, published reports, and census data. In June of 1981, and again in May of 1984, widespread floods occurred across a 15 county area in southeastern Kentucky. Because they were participating in a concurrent panel study, about 250 older adults living in the area were interviewed within 3 months before, and within six months after, the first of these floods occurred. As a part of the current project, all were interviewed again in the fall of 1985, about 1 and 1/2 years after the second flood. Thus, the design for the study is longitudinal and prospective. Each respondent has a minimum of 3 waves of data, about 200 respondents have 6 waves of data, and all respondents have predisaster data. In the proposed research, no new data from respondents would be required.
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