Stress and health behaviour over the life course
Section snippets
Stress and Health Behaviour
Some behaviours, such as smoking, are harmful to health while others, such as exercise, may promote health. A number of health behaviours, including smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, and overeating (reflected in overweight/obesity status), are associated with morbidity, disability, and mortality (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). A great deal of research has been devoted to identifying the social and psychological factors – including stress – that are associated with
Data and sample
We analyse data from four waves of the Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) Study, a national panel survey conducted in the United States. Our analytic subsample is comprised of the 3,497 respondents who were either non-Hispanic White or African American. Data were collected at four time points – in 1986, 1989, 1994, and 2001. We use Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) methods (provided by MPLUS) to impute missing values due to survey attrition or missing data. The assumption of MAR (missing
Stress Burden
Average levels of adult stress burden decline over time (b=−0.017, p<0.01) in the sample as a whole, although any particular individual in the sample may have experienced an increase or decrease (or fluctuations up and down) in adult stress burden over the study period. We find evidence for fluctuation in an unconditional growth curve model (not presented here) that reveals substantial variation in the random intercept (var=0.446, p<0.001) and modest variation in the random slope (var=0.003, p
Discussion
Certainly, both positive and negative health behaviours have a cumulative effect on health over the life course. In fact, Rowe and Kahn argue that, “the role of aging per se … has often been overstated and that a major component of many age-associated declines can be explained in terms of life style, habits, diet, and an array of psychosocial factors extrinsic to the aging process” (Rowe & Kahn, 1987, p. 143; also see Mirowsky & Ross, 1998). Increasing public health concerns about health
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by Grant #RO1 AGO26613 from the National Institute on Aging (Principle Investigator, Debra Umberson).
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