This is a revised application proposing to examine how chronic economic and family adversity, experienced earlier in the life course, affects the health of rural adults at midlife. The study is to be conducted by collecting a new wave of data in the year 2000 from the adults in two established panels, the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP) and the Iowa Single Parent Project (ISPP). Both panels were initiated in the wake of the farm crisis and are being returned to during a time when rural families are struggling despite national prosperity.
Aim #1 tests hypotheses linking chronic economic pressure and family stress, documented in 1991, 1992 and 1994 when the adults in the study were in their late 30s and early 40s, to subsequent psychological and physical health as reported in 2000. Part of this aim is to determine whether decade-long trajectories of change in response to chronic adversity are the same for psychological and physical health.
Aim #2 examines the extent to which chronic adversity affects the distribution, timing, and sequencing of midlife events and transitions. These events and transitions, in turn, are hypothesized to affect psychological and physical health. Is there evidence, for example, that chronic economic pressure sets in motion a sequence of events (e.g. job disruptions, marital discord) which, when unresolved, affects health? Is there evidence that chronic family stress, videotaped repeatedly in the early 1990s, affects the timing of midlife transitions (e.g. early pregnancy of child, etc.) which, when unresolved, affects health? Aim #3 tests hypotheses about the moderating role of personal and social resources, as well as the history of chronic adversity, on the ability of parents to resolve difficult midlife events and transitions, and to cope with those events and transitions that are difficult to resolve. The original IYFP (n=413 couples) and ISPP (n=109 divorced women) panels have been kept intact by annual telephone interviews. The plan is to conduct in-home interviews with the married couples and single women in fall, 2000. The interviews will include a life history calendar to document midlife events and transitions that occurred between 1995 and 1999.
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