Environmental Factors that Regulate Terminal Decline: Late-Life as a Natural Experiment

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Denis Gerstorf
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237236826

Lifespan psychological perspectives have long suggested that individuals live in contexts that create both opportunities for and constraints on individual development (Baltes, 1987). Many perspectives, including human ecology (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and environmental gerontology (Wahl, 2001) highlight the importance of ecological factors for development. Studies of late-life suggest that impending death provides a natural testing-the-limits paradigm for studying mechanisms of change and how environmental factors operate. For example, the environmental docility notion suggests that contextual features become increasingly important as personal competencies decline (Lawton, 1990). Accumulating mortality-related burdens and systemic dysfunction (e.g., declining physical or cognitive health) stress the adaptive and regulatory systems of individuals; making it increasingly difficult to maintain health and well-being. Late-life declines in health and well-being thus offer a unique opportunity to observe and understand the mechanisms through which the environment regulates development.Our overarching objective is to identify the structural features of the environment that are malleable levers for public health, intervention, and prevention. Working from the idea that late-life provides a particularly useful crucible of stress tests where differences stand out in bas-relief, we examine how individual-level and regional-level characteristics regulate health and well-being in the face of impending death. To do so, we combine psychological and demographic perspectives in the analysis of multi-year longitudinal data obtained from now deceased participants in large, representative samples from three highly industrialized nations.The specific aims of this three-year proposal are:(1) To describe between-person differences in late-life decline and identify the role of proximal individual factors (e.g., age at death, gender, education, income, social embedding, perceived control, cognitive abilities, personality, etc.). We also use models that implicate the accumulation of disability as a major force underlying late-life change and examine how the timing and progression of disability-related mechanisms contribute to differences in decline.(2) To examine the role distal regional factors play in regulating the progression of individual late-life declines. Using three-level growth models, we will identify what portions of late-life inequalities are accounted for by regional characteristics, and examine the specific economic, service, social, and physical characteristics of the environment that regulate individual adaptation and regulation.(3) To replicate the emerging models of environmental risk regulators in multiple nationally representative data sets. The multi-nation nature of our proposal allows initial insights into the robustness of the phenomena under study and represents a key step towards understanding their context specificity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Person: Professor Nilam Ram, Ph.D.