Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Multi-Indicator Constellations of Physical Health and Psychosocial Correlates
Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Multi-Indicator Constellations of Physical Health and Psychosocial Correlates
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DOI：
10.1037/dev0000274
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发表时间：
2017-05-01
影响因子：
4
通讯作者：
Gerstorf, Denis
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Brandmaier, Andreas M.;Ram, Nilam;Gerstorf, Denis
在成年期和老年期，幸福感通常相对稳定，但在生命的最后阶段，通常会出现明显的恶化和巨大的个体差异。然而，造成这些差异的因素还没有得到很好的理解。利用德国社会经济小组研究（SOEP，死亡年龄：M = 73.2岁；SD = 14.3岁；52%为女性）中4,404名现已去世的参与者长达25年的年度纵向数据，我们探讨了社会人口变量、身体健康和负担因素以及心理社会特征的多指标群的作用。扩展早期的报告，结构方程模型（SEM）树使我们能够识别与晚年幸福轨迹形状差异相关的变量概况。研究发现，身体健康因素在幸福感下降中起主要作用，但与社会参与等社会心理特征相互作用。为了说明这一点，对于社会参与度低的人来说，残疾是晚年幸福轨迹差异的最强关联。然而，对于社会参与度高的人来说，一个人是否在医院度过了相当长的时间，会导致晚年幸福感的高与低、稳定与下降。我们通过从一组重新采样的SEM树（所谓的SEM森林）中得出的变量重要性测量来证实这些结果，这些测量提供了变量对不同晚年幸福的总体交互影响的稳健和比较指标。我们讨论了我们的方法的好处和局限性，并将我们的发现与其他关于防止幸福感最终下降的保护因素的报告结合起来考虑。
Well-being is often relatively stable across adulthood and old age, but typically exhibits pronounced deteriorations and vast individual differences in the terminal phase of life. However, the factors contributing to these differences are not well understood. Using up to 25-year annual longitudinal data obtained from 4,404 now-deceased participants of the nationwide German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP; age at death: M = 73.2 years; SD = 14.3 years; 52% women), we explored the role of multi-indicator constellations of sociodemographic variables, physical health and burden factors, and psychosocial characteristics. Expanding earlier reports, structural equation model (SEM) trees allowed us to identify profiles of variables that were associated with differences in the shape of late-life well-being trajectories. Physical health factors were found to play a major role for well-being decline, but in interaction with psychosocial characteristics such as social participation. To illustrate, for people with low social participation, disability emerged as the strongest correlate of differences in late-life well-being trajectories. However, for people with high social participation, whether or not an individual had spent considerable time in the hospital differentiated high versus low and stable versus declining late-life well-being. We corroborated these results with variable importance measures derived from a set of resampled SEM trees (so-called SEM forests) that provide robust and comparative indicators of the total interactive effects of variables for differential late-life well-being. We discuss benefits and limitations of our approach and consider our findings in the context of other reports about protective factors against terminal decline in well-being.