Midlife Marital and Financial Stress and the Progression of Later-Life Health Problems for Husbands and Wives
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wickrama2021 - p. 685
This is also consistent with the stress proliferation notion of the stress process perspective (Pearlin et al., 2005), which suggests that stress, and stress responses, may proliferate across multiple domains over the life course. Such proliferation may result in bidirectional associations between physical health, mental health, and loneliness over the life course.
wickrama2021 - p. 688
The data used to evaluate these hypotheses are from the Iowa Youth and Family Project (IYFP, 1989–1994), which was later continued as two panel studies: the Midlife Transitions Project (MTP) in 2001 and the Later Adulthood Study (LAS) in 2015 and 2017. Together, these projects provide data over 27 years on rural families from a cluster of eight counties in north-central Iowa that closely mirror the economic diversity of the rural Midwest.
wickrama2021 - p. 689
The list of economic difficulties was adapted from Dohrenwend et al. (1978) to capture families’ economic circumstances.
wickrama2021 - p. 689
Marital stress was assessed by each spouses’ subjective evaluation of negative conflictual behaviors, which captures violence, demands, anger, ignorance, criticisms, disagreements, tension/arguments, annoyance, being let down, and being blamed.
wickrama2021 - p. 689
The Symptoms Checklist 90-R (SCL-90-R; see Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983) assessed three specific symptoms of husbands’ and wives’ psychological distress in their middle years (2001) and later life (2015 and 2017), including depressive symptoms, anxiety, and hostility. Items were scored on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 = not at all to 5 = extremely. Mean scores for the three symptoms were averaged to create an overall score of psychological distress with higher scores indicating more distress.
wickrama2021 - p. 689
composite measure of poor physical health was created for 2001 (middle years) and later life (2015 and 2017) by adding standardized measures of common physical health problems prevalent in later adulthood, including self-assessed poor global health, physical limitations, and bodily pain (Wickrama et al., 2020a).
wickrama2021 - p. 690
Husbands and wives completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell et al., 1978) in 2015 and 2017. The 20-item scale was designed to measure one’s subjective feelings of loneliness as well as feelings of social isolation. Participants rated each item on a 4-point scale (1 = never; 4 = often), and items were averaged.
wickrama2021 - p. 690
Overall, this model fit the data well (χ2(df) = 250.85(108), CFI = .94, and RMSEA = .07).