Family Transitions, Marital Functioning and Health:Longitudinal and Dyadic Links

描述（由申请人提供）：在美国，经历婚姻期间的空巢是成年中期的高度规范，但在此期间很少进行纵向婚姻研究。确定配偶和婚姻在空巢期间的状况很重要，因为婚姻功能预测了老年人晚年生活的广泛结果，包括身体，心理和经济健康以及死亡率。同样，中年健康和幸福可靠地预测了向老年的发展过渡。在这个建议中，我提出了两个具体的目标，以解决我们对空巢在中年婚姻功能和健康中的作用的理解上的差距。首先，我建议检查空巢状态的预测婚姻功能（质量和课程）和健康（精神和身体）的男性和女性随着时间的推移，然后测试主持人的纵向协会。其次，我建议使用从参与者和他们的配偶获得的二元数据，以测试在夫妇之间的关联，同时空巢状态和丈夫和妻子的婚姻质量和健康，分别，并再次测试这些联系的主持人。本提案旨在通过对威斯康星州纵向研究（WLS）的增值二次分析来实现这些目标。由于几个原因，WLS特别适合实现所提出的目标。首先，跨越中年的详细访谈跟踪了参与者的空巢状态，关系功能和健康状况。在这里，复杂的定量方法将适当地处理纵向数据。此外，WLS在一项研究中纳入了质量和课程的婚姻功能指标，提供了调和现有空巢文献中不同结果的可能性。第二，WLS包括一个配偶子样本，这将有助于直接的统计测试比较效果 空巢对婚姻质量和健康的影响。同样，将采用适当的二元定量建模。第三，广泛的理论上知情的配偶和婚姻特征将作为协变量和潜在的调节剂进行测试，从而阐明保护和风险因素。因此，拟议中的研究具有重要的意义，旨在防止和减轻痛苦的合作伙伴和关系的翻译努力。确定鼓励一些配偶和婚姻在中年时期茁壮成长和持久的保护因素对于理解健康老龄化的决定因素和促进公共卫生至关重要。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Experiencing the empty nest during marriage is highly normative in middle adulthood in the United States, yet scant longitudinal marital research has been conducted during this period. Establishing how spouses and marriages fare during the empty nest is important because marital functioning predicts an extensive set of older adults' outcomes in the later years of life, including physical, psychological, and financial health, and mortality. As well, midlife health and well-being reliably predict the developmental transition to old age. In this proposal, I set forth two specific aims to address gaps in our understanding of the role of the empty nest in middle adulthood marital functioning and health. First, I propose to examine empty nest status as a predictor of both marital functioning (quality and course) and health (mental and physical) for men and women over time, and to then test moderators of the longitudinal associations. Second, I propose to use dyadic data obtained from participants and their spouses to test within-couple associations between concurrent empty nest status and husbands' and wives' marital quality and health, respectively, and to again test moderators of these linkages. This proposal seeks to conduct these aims with value-added secondary analysis of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). The WLS is uniquely suited to accomplish the proposed aims for several reasons. First, detailed interviews that spanned middle adulthood tracked participants' empty nest status, relationship functioning, and health over time. Here, sophisticated quantitative methods will appropriately handle longitudinal data. Additionally, the WLS incorporates marital functioning indicators of quality and course in a single study, offering the potential to reconcile disparate findings in the existing empty nest literature. Second, the WLS includes a spousal sub-sample, which will facilitate direct statistical tests comparing effects of the empty nest on marital quality and health for husbands versus wives. Again, appropriate dyadic quantitative modeling will be employed. Third, a broad array of theoretically-informed spouse and marriage characteristics will be tested as covariates and potential moderators, thereby elucidating protective and risk factors. Thus, the proposed research holds important implications for translational efforts designed to prevent and alleviate distress in partners and relationships. Identifying protective factors that encourage some spouses and marriages to thrive and endure in middle adulthood is critical to understanding the determinants of healthy aging and promoting public health.