scholarly journals Social Relations, Stress, and Racial Health Disparities

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 588-588
Author(s):  
Kristine Ajrouch ◽  
Noah Webster ◽  
Toni Antonucci
Keyword(s):  
Health Disparities ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Racial Health Disparities ◽  
Bidirectional Association ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This symposium brings together four papers that address racial health disparities by investigating stressful aspects of social relations at different points in the life course. Cleary and colleagues focus on racial disparities in psychological health by testing cross-sectional effects of intergenerational stress over time. In particular, they investigate effects of network composition on the relationship between mothers' stressors and their children's depressive symptoms at three time points over 23 years. Camacho and colleagues use longitudinal data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project to examine cognitive decline among U.S. African-American, Latino, and White adults aged 60 and above. Results indicate loneliness predicted greater global cognitive decline over time in all groups. However, race differences in this association were found across cognitive function domains. Turner and colleagues consider dementia caregiving challenges among non-Hispanic Blacks. Data from five focus groups were analyzed to reveal distinctive challenges to caregiver health during the COVID-19 pandemic including increased burden and barriers to service access. Finally, Sol and colleagues examined the bidirectional association between loneliness and self-rated health over time among a racially diverse sample. Findings illustrate racial patterns in how loneliness at midlife influences health in later life. Antonucci will discuss the role of stress from social relations as a means to fully understand racial disparities in health across the life course.

Stress, Social Relations, and Psychological Health Over the Life Course

GeroPsych ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine J. Ajrouch ◽  
Sawsan Abdulrahim ◽  
Toni C. Antonucci
Keyword(s):  
Depressive Symptoms ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Buffering Effect ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Negative Support ◽  
Positive Support ◽  
Buffering Effects

This paper documents experiences of stress among people 18+ (N = 500) in Beirut, Lebanon. We investigate the extent to which social relations function as a stabilizing factor for psychological health. Regression analyses indicate a curvilinear link between stress and psychological health. Both low and high levels of stress predict higher depressive symptoms. Among those aged 18–39 years, there is no buffering effect of social relations yet for those aged 40–59 years positive support quality buffers the effect of stress on depressive symptoms. Among those 60+ years old, negative support quality buffers the effect of stress on depressive symptoms. The function of social relations varies both in its main and buffering effects at different points in the life course.

scholarly journals Recomposing persons: Scavenging and storytelling in a birth cohort archive

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512199539
Author(s):  
Penny Tinkler ◽  
Resto Cruz ◽  
Laura Fenton
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Cohort Studies ◽  
Birth Cohort ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Relational Embeddedness ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Over Time

Birth cohort studies can be used not only to generate population-level quantitative data, but also to recompose persons. The crux is how we understand data and persons. Recomposition entails scavenging for various (including unrecognised) data. It foregrounds the perspective and subjectivity of survey participants, but without forgetting the partiality and incompleteness of the accounts that it may generate. Although interested in the singularity of individuals, it attends to the historical and relational embeddedness of personhood. It examines the multiple and complex temporalities that suffuse people’s lives, hence departing from linear notions of the life course. It implies involvement, as well as reflexivity, on the part of researchers. It embraces the heterogeneity and transformations over time of scientific archives and the interpretive possibilities, as well as incompleteness, of birth cohort studies data. Interested in the unfolding of lives over time, it also shines light on meaningful biographical moments.

scholarly journals A Confluence of Policy Inequality: Health Disparities in Old Age Among American Indian and Alaska Native Populations

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 37-37
Author(s):  
Sadie Giles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Disparities ◽  
Life Course ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
Political History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Life Course

Abstract Racial health disparities in old age are well established, and new conceptualizations and methodologies continue to advance our understanding of health inequality across the life course. One group that is overlooked in many of these analyses, however, is the aging American Indian/Native Alaskan (AI/NA) population. While scholars have attended to the unique health inequities faced by the AI/NA population as a whole due to its discordant political history with the US government, little attention has been paid to unique patterns of disparity that might exist in old age. I propose to draw critical gerontology into the conversation in order to establish a framework through which we can uncover barriers to health, both from the political context of the AI/NA people as well as the political history of old age policy in the United States. Health disparities in old age are often described through a cumulative (dis)advantage framework that offers the benefit of appreciating that different groups enter old age with different resources and health statuses as a result of cumulative inequalities across the life course. Adding a framework of age relations, appreciating age as a system of inequality where people also gain or lose access to resources and status upon entering old age offers a path for understanding the intersection of race and old age. This paper will show how policy history for this group in particular as well as old age policy in the United States all create a unique and unequal circumstance for the aging AI/NA population.

scholarly journals Racial Disparities in Cognitive Function: The Roles of Cumulative Stress Exposures Across the Life Course

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 504-504
Author(s):  
Ruijia Chen ◽  
Jennifer Weuve ◽  
Laura Kubzansky ◽  
David Williams
Keyword(s):  
Executive Function ◽  
Cognitive Function ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coping Resources ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Cumulative Stress ◽  
The Life Course

Abstract Introduction: Racial disparities in cognitive function have been well-documented in the literature, but factors driving the disparities remain under explored. This study aims to quantify the extent to which cumulative stress exposures across the life course explain Black–White disparities in executive function and episodic memory. Method: Data were drawn from the 2004–2006 wave of the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) and the MIDUS refresher study (N=5,967, 5,277 White, 690 Black). Cumulative stress exposures were assessed by using 10 domains of stressors (e.g., financial stress, childhood adversity). Cognitive function was assessed using the Brief Test of Adult Cognition by Telephone. Marginal structural models were conducted to quantify the proportion of the effect of race/ethnicity status on cognitive function that can be explained by cumulative stress exposures. Result: Blacks reported higher levels of cumulative stress exposures and lower average levels of executive function and episodic memory than Whites. Cumulative stress exposures explained 8.43% of the disparities in executive function and 13.21 % of the disparities in episodic memory. Cumulative stress exposures had stronger effects on racial disparities in cognitive function in the older age group (age≥ 55 years old) than in the younger age group (age < 55 years old). Conclusion: Cumulative stress exposures explain modest proportions of racial disparities in levels of cognitive function. Interventions that focus on reducing stress exposures or improving coping resources among Blacks may help lessen racial disparities in cognitive function at the population level.

Predictors of Alcohol Use Disorders Among Baby Boomers Across the Life Course

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (8) ◽  
pp. 880-888
Author(s):  
Adam Quinn ◽  
Orion Mowbray
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Use ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Baby Boomers ◽  
Alcohol Use Disorders ◽  
Life Course Perspective ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Older Adulthood ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Over Time

Research suggests that baby boomers entering older adulthood may possess unique alcohol use patterns over time. Using the life course perspective as a guiding framework, this empirical study sought to examine correlates of alcohol use disorders among baby boomers by examining representative data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health at two points in time, 1998 ( N = 6,213) and 2010 ( N = 5,880). Results from logistic regression analyses suggest that predictors of alcohol use disorders evolve over time as baby boomers continue to age. Risk factors for alcohol use disorders among baby boomers may include concurrent unprescribed pain reliever use, p < .01, while protective factors such as income, p < .01, and social supports, p = .01, may be of increased importance. Based on the findings of this study, practice implications and future research are discussed.

scholarly journals Religion and old age

1998 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRACE DAVIE ◽  
JOHN VINCENT
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Human History ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
One Stage ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Over Time

The interconnections between religion and old age are complex; the more so given that the concept of age itself has – for a large part of human history – been determined by religious understandings of life. In traditional societies, religion played a crucial part in structuring the transitions between one stage of the life and the next and in defining maturity and fulfilment. And up to a point it still does: in Western societies at the turn of the millennium the association of religious rituals with key moments in the life course – birth, adolescence, marriage and above all death – remains widespread. Such interconnections change over time, however; they also vary from place to place.

Citizenship Across the Life Course

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
International Borders ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
The Way

Analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant’s life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites.

Time, Scheduling and Cinema-Going

2011 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jancovich
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Time Scheduling ◽  
Consumption Change ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Over Time

The article considers the ways in which the meanings of film consumption are shaped by their timing or scheduling within people's lives. It begins by considering the ways in which these meanings are shaped in relation to historical time, and how the meanings of film consumption change over time. It then moves on to consider the ‘life course’, or the ways in which meanings of film consumption are affected by the different stages that people pass through across a lifetime. Finally, the article considers more cyclical patterns and routines such as those of the year, week and day. In the process, it seeks to demonstrate that film consumption is about much more than the interpretation of individual programs, and involves a series of social activities that are meaningful within broader social contexts.

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