Notre Dame Study of Resiliency in Later Life

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research builds on the progress of the Notre Dame Study of Resilience in Later Life (NDSRL, R01 AG023571). The goal is to extend and enrich the NDSRL data by collecting information on an additional cohort of middle age adults. The overarching objective is to advance understanding of the multiple pathways that lead to successful development during the middle (40-60) and later (60-75) years of adulthood. The broad purview of the proposed work underscores the need for methodologies that are responsive to individual variation in development and growth across multiple domains (e.g., psychological, social, emotional) over the adulthood lifecourse (e.g., early midlife, late midlife, and early old age). To advance these priorities, the proposed research agenda calls for a series of overlapping longitudinal and short-term burst studies that can conceptually integrate developmental and life-course perspectives. The major aim is to construct a portrait of individual development across a broad range of ages within a comparatively short time span (five years of data collection) by using an accelerated longitudinal design. Modeling processes of intraindividual variability and change can help to reveal how long-term trajectories of health and well-being, which are reasonably consistent across different individuals, may differ dramatically within different subgroups of individuals (Aims 1 and 2); elucidate how these complex trajectories of intraindividual changes are contoured by selective individual differences variables (Aim 3); separate intraindividual differences in developmental change from aspects of temporal phenomena that exhibit shorter-term variability overtime (Aim 4); demonstrate how dimensions of interindividual differences may be used to explain adaptive intraindividual processes (Aim 5); and clarify, through the use of life stories (Aim 6), how individual development is embedded in multiple ecologies (e.g., biological, familial, historical, social, and cultural) that delimit both opportunities and constraints. The study of risk and resiliency across mid-life and old age holds great promise for public health policy in the areas of intervention and prevention.