Most aging individuals prefer to remain in a self-determined home environment, and generally aging adults want to remain in the same home or same community. The benefits of remaining in a self-determined private home environment while aging have been established. Because individuals present a diversity of needs, it takes interdisciplinary...
Having excess weight carries a negative social stigma in the U.S. Previous research has shown that experiencing stigma has negative physical and mental health consequences. Few studies have examined how experiencing weight stigma might act as a barrier to engaging in healthy behaviors among older adults. The purpose of this...
The ability to independently age in place requires an appropriate match between a person and the environment, or P-E fit. The person-environment interaction helps describe the adaptation processes employed in older age to achieve P-E fit, but is little understood. Therefore, the objective of this two-part study was to gain...
Retirement is one of the most important transitional events in later life. Despite a large body of research examining the impacts of retirement on health, questions still remain regarding the relationship between retirement timing and subsequent health and survival. Previous research examining the existence, direction, and magnitude of the relationship...
Ageism in the context of global population aging could lead to increasing human and economic costs. Age stereotypes tend to be negative (Hummert, 1990) and ubiquitous (Nelson, 2002) there are a variety of well documented detrimental consequences of negative age stereotypes on older adults' physical, cognitive and psychological outcomes (Hummert,...
We examined how the experiences of World War II and Korean War veterans,
including prewar, warzone, and postwar factors, affected PTSD symptoms in later life.
This dissertation consists of two studies. In Study 1, four different hypotheses from a
lifespan approach were examined (King et al., 1996): stress evaporation (only...
Health officials have recently been sounding the alarm that depression will soon
surpass many of the major medical conditions in causing disability among adults. Recent
demographic and health trends are generating public health concern about depression.
First, the prevalence of chronic conditions has dramatically increased over the last several
generations....
This thesis describes how heteropatriarchal, settler colonialism impacted Indigenous communities' systems in power and control, particularly with the American Indian Movement during the 1960s-1970s. Further, the gendered divides this created within the American Indian Movement are described. The murder of Anna Mae Aquash is revisited as an act of gendered...