Life course studies increasingly note the importance of psychological resilience (PR) in modifying negative outcomes, especially in the wake of adverse life course events. Although the salience of PR in later life has been established in specific groups, such as veterans, little is known about its efficacy for health in the broader population of older Americans. We utilize the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and items in the Leave Behind Questionnaire (LBQ) (N=13,930) to compare a recently developed measure of PR to three personal resources commonly utilized in the literature: mastery, optimism, and hopefulness, in its connection to self-reported health and well-being. Cross-sectional and 2-year change score results from ordinary least squares regressions (OLS) suggest that after standardization, PR’s significant protective associations with all four health outcomes (self-rated health, depressive symptoms, functional limitations, activities of daily living) are substantially stronger (between 5 and 10 times the magnitude) than the other personal resources tested, net of demographic and socioeconomic controls. Further, results suggest PR may be particularly salient for racial minorities in their self-assessments of well-being. Further analysis in an SEM framework will include formal difference tests across effect sizes and trajectories of the health outcomes to 1. directly account for health selection into resilience and 2. determine whether the effects of PR and other resources have lasting or cumulative impacts across later life. Our preliminary findings suggest PR is a powerful personal resource compared to other commonly used measures in connection to later life health and well-being.
展开▼
