The goal of the proposed research is to develop and evaluate a survey questionnaire called MIDJA (Midlife in Japan) that will be used to examine the role of sociocultural factors in reports of health and well-being among a sample of Japanese adults at midlife. The purpose of this research is to: 1) assess whether a set of measures and scales that have been used in the 1995 MacArthur Foundation Research Network Study on Successful Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS-Midlife in the U.S.) can be translated and used successfully with Japanese respondents, 2) pilot a number of new items based on Japanese understandings of well-being, and 3) examine the effects of different cultural models of self and relationships on health and well-being. The national survey known as MIDUS (core sample = 3,485) was conceived by a mufti-disciplinary team of researchers investigating the effects of behavioral, psychological, and social factors on physical and mental health. Following the proposed pilot study (N=500), those measures and scales found to be valid in Japanese cultural contexts will be combined to form the MIDJA questionnaire which will be used in a proposal submitted as a R01 supplement to the P01 proposal entitled """"""""MIDUS II-Integrative Pathways to Health and Illness"""""""" (Principal Investigator, Carol D. Ryff). The P01 proposes to collect a second round of data from the original MIDUS respondents.
The aim of the proposed pilot and the subsequent R01 supplement is to expand the sociocultural focus of the P01 by surveying a large, diverse sample of Japanese midlife adults that can be directly compared with the American midlife adults surveyed in MIDUS and MIDUS II. The primary assumption guiding the overall program of research (this R03 and the subsequent R01 supplement) is that well-being (mental and physical health) can assume a variety of meanings and expressions as people engage culture-specific models of self and relationships. These models linking social knowledge and social practices are features of specific sociocultural contexts. Japan is selected for study because it is a sociocultural context with strikingly different models of self and relationships from those prevalent in mainstream American society. A growing volume of comparative empirical research suggests that health and well-being may assume different forms in different sociocultural contexts and that the relationships between sociocultural parameters and health may be mediated and moderated differently in diverse contexts. A Japanese sample will greatly expand the range of psychosocial experience that is typically studied and will enable new comprehensive theoretical work on the nature of the links between psychosocial experience and health. In particular, it will afford the study of cultural similarities and differences in aging and well-being, social relationships and health, and socioeconomics factors and health.
