PROSPECTIVE STUDY OF THE MENTAL HEALTH OF BLACK WOMEN

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's abstract): The proposed study will investigate the mental and physical health status of a cohort of older African American women and examine how their well-being is dependent on earlier and concurrent family, social, and economic functioning. This longitudinal work will complete a developmental epidemiological study of women first identified in 1966-67 as the mothers of all the first graders from Woodlawn, a poor, African American community on the Southside of Chicago. The population consists of the 1,026 surviving mothers. The mothers were interviewed first in 1967 when their children were in first grade and again in 1975 when their children were adolescents. This application requests resources to reinterview the women for a third time in 1996, when they will range in age from 49 to 79 with a median age of 60. This proposed study follows on the recent successful adult (age 32) follow-up (80 percent reinterviewed) of the children of this cohort. Our conceptual framework is the Life Course Social Field Theory, a developmental perspective that focuses on the roles within the major social fields across the life course. (See figure 2). The focus of this proposal is to determine the patterning of roles across the major social fields of family, work, and community, and to understand the relationship of role performance to physical and psychological well being. The proposed study affords a unique opportunity to understand the nature and effects of intergenerational relationships across the life course. The overall aims are: 1. To model the continuity and change in the women's major social fields since 1967. 2. To model the continuity and change in the women's psychological and physical health since 1967. 3. To model the current and longitudinal relationships between successes and failure at meeting the social task demands key in social fields across the life course and the women's mental and physical health. We will test specific hypotheses about how past and current performances in social roles within specific social fields affect the women's psychological and physical health. We will also test how the women's psychological and physical health have affected their subsequent social adaptation. We will be particularly interested in using the wealth of data collected on the Woodlawn children to examine the reciprocal relationships between successes and failures in meeting the social tasks demands in the lives of both mothers and children. In this regard, we will test specific hypotheses about the adult children's successes or problems, and how relationships between the mothers and their adult children and grandchildren influence the women's psychological and physical health.