The proposed 60 month study will test the hypothesis that cultural background has a significant impact on the manner in which the normal aged respond to questions concerning their subjective well-being (SWB) because of the influence of cultural norms on value systems and affective styles. We hypothesize that cultural backgrounds carry values that help establish the criteria on which individuals base their own evaluation of SWB. We further hypothesize that these cultural traditions also carry judgments of what are appropriate and inappropriate ways to express one's affective state. A sample of 440 aged respondents stratified on cultural background, gender, and socio-economic status will be interviewed. The cultural groups selected (Protestants) represent a wide range of affective styles and life experiences. Selecting these groups allows for the effects of life experience, gender and status in American society to be taken into account in the analyses. The instrument will contain several standard measures of SWB as well as standard measures of other domains of life that will be administered in their tradition closed format. Then a sub-set of the SWB questions will be asked as open-ended questions, allowing the respondents to describe their answer to the question and how they arrived at their answer. Probes based on hypotheses constructed to predict the patterns of answers from members of each group will be asked of every respondent. An analysis of these open-ended answers and the responses to the probes will allow the hypotheses to be tested. Additional quantitative analyses will be conducted on the data collected in the close-ended format. This study will provide important information of the manner in which answers to questions concerning SWB are constructed. Further, a better understanding of the role of culture in the respondents' construction of SWB in old age will be an outcome of this study. Since the manner in which cultural background impacts on measures of SWB has received little attention, this research will make an important contribution to our understanding not only of the SWB of the elderly but will enrich our comprehension of the scales used to measure that SWB.
