WELL BEING AMONG AGED--PERSONAL CONTROL & SELF ESTEEM

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's abstract): The purpose of this application is to seek funds to continue work on the NIA-supported project, "Well-Being Among the Aged: Personal Control and Self-Esteem" (R01 AG-09221). The first three years of this project (1991-1993) were devoted to conducting a face-to-face nationwide survey of 1,103 older adults. Role-specific measures of stress, control, and self-worth were developed to test the following hypotheses: (1) that events arising in highly salient roles exert an especially noxious impact on well-being; (2) that these deleterious effects operate by eroding feelings of control and self-esteem associated with the roles in which these stressors emerged; and (3) that support provided by significant others tends to offset the impact of salient role stressors by bolstering bolster role-specific feelings of control and self-worth. The application seeks to build upon these findings by conducting two reinterviews with the participants in the baseline survey. This data will allow us to address the following new objectives: 1. To describe aggregate as well as individual-level change in multiple dimensions of stress, social support, personal control, self-esteem, and distress; 2. To estimate a series of three-wave panel models in order to evaluate the temporal ordering among the constructs listed above; 3. To assess whether levels of stress, social support, self-esteem, personal control, and distress vary across eight social roles when these roles are valued highly by older adults; 4. To estimate a latent variable model that is designed to see if specific kinds of stressors, social support, and feelings of control influence the selection of particular kinds of coping responses; 5. To examine the effects of role transitions on distress; 6. To assess whether specific types of salient role stressors exert a differential impact on depressive symptoms; 7. To explore whether social support provided in one role (e.g., the parental role) offsets the effects of stress arising in another role (e.g., the marital role); 8. To see whether the value placed on social roles influences whether the effects of stressors arising in one role spill over into another role.