Journal of Geronrolog v 1975, Vol. 30, No. 6, 701-706
Happiness and Social Participation in Aging1 Marshall J. Graney, PhD2
significance of social activities for T HEwell-being in old age has been a topic of sustained interest among gerontologists. As a result, the relationship between social activity and happiness (as a criterion of well-being) has been frequently studied. Some of the earliest research in social gerontology takes this relationship as a research problem (Morgan, 1937; Landis, 1940). Interest in this matter has continued over time (Cavan, Burgess, Havighurst, & Goldhamer, 1949; Havighurst & Albrecht, 1953), and continued to motivate research to the present (Bley, Goodman, Dye, & Hard, 1972; Bultena & Oyler, 1971; Palmore, 1968; and others). The primary objective of the present study was to clarify and extend findings from past research by focusing specifically (and exclusively) on happiness as a criterion of well-being in analysis of longitudinal data on the social activities of a sample of elderly women. Several conceptualizations of well-being have been developed and introduced over the years, and the two most frequently used are morale and adjustment. Use of these two concepts (and others) has involved implicit or explicit assumptions that these ways of conceptualizing wellbeing were either synonymous with happiness or that happiness was a major factor in them. These assumptions may not be justified, and a case can be made for the usefulness of 'The research reported here was supported under a NIH training grant through the Midwest Council for Social Research in Aging, Institute for Community Studies, Kansas City, MO. Thanks are also due to Donald G. McTavish and Gregory P. Stone for their advice and helpful comments. 'Dept. of Sociology, Wichita State Univ., Wichita, 67208.
definitions and operational specifications for such concepts that would allow for their independence from each other. If empirical measures of such concepts prove to be related in further research, then the causal priorities among them becomes a research topic for its own sake (Graney & Graney, 1973). However, morale and adjustment are not the only criteria of well-being that have been considered in social research. Continuities with past research are maintained by many studies which seek to establish empirical connections between several conceptualizations of older people's well-being and their socially significant activities. Instead of attempting to explicitly study a global concept like well-being, these and related studies have generally defined particular criteria of well-being, such as morale (Lawton, 1972, 1975; Rubenstein, 1971); personal adjustment (Cavan, et al., 1949); psychological well-being (Havens, 1968; Neugarten, 1972); life satisfaction (Bell, 1974; Spreitzer & Snyder, 1974; Tobin & Neugarten, 1961), and so on. In current usage none of these concepts is synonymous with happiness, but each criterion of well-being includes happiness as a significant part of its conceptual definition. Research on the relationship between social activity and happiness bears on all of the studies cited above, and vice versa. As is the case with all products of human effort, the research projects that have pursued these interests have been vulnerable to substantial methodological criticisms, and some have improved on others. Nevertheless, problems of 701
Downloaded from http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on May 30, 2015
This paper reports on a 4-year longitudinal study of 60 elderly women. Data about their happiness and social activities were collected using the Affect Balance Scale and nine measures of socially relevant activities, including three measures of media use, three of interpersonal interaction, and three of activities in voluntary associations. Direct relationships between happiness and social activity among elderly people were found in analysis of these data. This finding was not spurious according to longitudinal data: activity increments were associated with happiness and decrements with unhappiness. Although these findings describe the over-all picture, changes in activities may be more important to happiness among the most elderly persons interviewed than others.
702
GRANEY
The use of longitudinal data, in conjunction with the ABS, represented an attempt in this study to use current techniques to extend the long-standing tradition of research on social activity and happiness in old age and in aging. METHODS
Subjects Sixty elderly women, aged 62 to 89 years at first contact, were selected from the rosters of a metropolitan Housing and Redevelopment Authority to constitute a panel of interview respondents. All were initially in good health,
able to keep house, and lived alone. Because of difficulties in securing a representative number of elderly men it was decided that the sample would be composed of women only. Of the original 60, 46 survived, were locatable, and agreed to be interviewed again after a period of 4 years. Forty-four of the 46 gave usable responses to the 29 questions described below and analyzed in the following sections of this article. Each respondent was asked to recall her date of birth, rather than her chronological age, to minimize response errors. Using this information, ages were computed in data analysis. For analysis, the sample was split into three parts according to age: youngest, middle, and oldest; each as nearly equal in size to the others as possible (youngest, 16 persons aged 66 to 75 years; middle, 13 persons aged 77 to 81 years; oldest, 17 persons aged 82 to 92 years). Procedure Graney's (1973) revision of the ABS was used to measure happiness in this study. In using this ten-item scale all interviewees were asked to respond to five questions about feelings of happiness (or positive affect) alternated with five questions about feelings of unhappiness (or negative affect). An ABS score for each respondent was obtained by adding the sum of agreements with positive scale items to the negative sum of agreements with negative items. As one might expect, the middle of the range of observed scores was near zero, and 3 respondents obtained this score. Seventeen others were only one point away from this score, and all 20 of these persons were assigned to a middle category with respect to happiness. Approximately the same number of persons scored above this middle range as below it. Eleven persons expressed a majority of positive feelings, and 13 a majority of negative feelings. Social participation. — Nine questions about social participation were asked at each of two interviews using the same questions each time, but with a temporal separation of 4 years between repetitions. Of the nine questions, three concerned media use, three concerned interpersonal interaction, and three concerned participation in voluntary associations. The media-use questions measured the extent of the interviewee's use of television and radio, as well as amount of time devoted to reading books, newspapers, and magazines. Measures of interpersonal interaction included frequency of
Downloaded from http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on May 30, 2015
validity and interpretation have remained due to difficulties of operationalizing concepts, measurement, and analysis. Yet, both early and more recent research findings have usually cross-validated one another in the sense that their findings, more often than not, confirm each other. It has been found that older persons who are the most active seem happiest. This is true when happiness is conceptualized and measured in a variety of ways, ranging from subjective judges' ratings to objective and formal questionnaire scales. That is to say, with few exceptions, happiness among the aged (or successful aging, morale, life satisfaction, selfesteem, and so on) correlates positively with social activity in many studies (for example, see Kutner, Fanshel, Togo, & Langer, 1956; Palmore, 1968; and many others). One methodological criticism of much of the previous research on this topic has been its almost exclusive reliance on inferences about the process of aging based on cross-sectional analysis of data. Another criticism has focused on inappropriate ways of measuring happiness. Such criticisms have often seemed justified, because of the availability of more acceptable and rigorous procedures. The validity of widely used happiness scales has been a particularly serious methodological problem (Britton, 1964; Britton & Mather, 1958). Although we cannot claim to have solved this problem, this research project used a happiness scale, the Affect Balance Scale (ABS), whose validity has been studied with an intensity previously unknown (Bradburn, 1969; Bradburn & Caplovitz, 1965). Recently a validity study of the ABS confirmed its usefulness for applications with older people (Moriwaki, 1974). The form of the ABS used in this research project incorporated relatively minor but potentially important modifications to the original form to adapt it for use with older people (Graney, 1973).
703
HAPPINESS AND SOCIAL PARTICIPATION Table I. Measures of Social Participation.
Activity Category
Question Low Activity
(N)
Moderate Activity
(N)
High Activity
(N)
2 or less less than 1 less than 1 less than daily
(3D
more than 2 to 5 1 to 2
(29) (31) (20)
(30) (28)
Visiting friends & relatives
monthly or less
(27)
more than S more than 2 more than 3 more than once a day more than weekly
Telephone calls (daily) Religious services Voluntary association: Attendance Voluntary association: Membership
2 or less never
5 or more weekly or more
(15) (43)
regularly
(27)
2 or more
(20)
Hours: Television (daily) Hours: Radio (daily) Hours: Reading (daily) Visiting neighbors
(27) (49) (30)
Ito3 about once a day
(26) (23)
(34)
3 to 4
(27)
(28)
sometimes
never
(47)
sometimes
(21) (10)
none
(44)
one
(28)
face-to-face interaction with nearby neighbors as well as with friends and relatives who lived beyond walking distance of the interviewee's residence. In addition, data were also collected on frequency of telephone use. Participation in voluntary associations was measured with questions about attendance at religious services as well as questions about maintenance of memberships and attendance activity in other relatively formal associations. On the basis of their empirical distributions, the responses for each of these nine measures were classified into low, moderate, and high activity categories of as nearly equal size as possible for analysis and presentation of findings, as shown in Table 1. The precise wording of the questions used regarding social participation is published elsewhere (Graney & Graney, 1974). RESULTS
The questions in the ABS were used in the second wave of interviews, so it was possible to study the correlation between happiness and both current activity level (in old age) and changes in activity level over a period of time (in aging). Examination of current activity levels showed that (with only a couple of exceptions) happiness and social activity were directly related in these data, confirming what has been found in other cross-sectional studies. Table 2 shows these relationships between happiness and social activities in old age for the entire sample. According to these findings, the current levels of activity reported in six of the nine measures of social participation were significantly related to happiness at the conventional (p(a) = 0.05) level of statistical significance, and a seventh was close to statistical significance with p(a) = 0.06.
(26)
Table 2. Happiness and Social Activity in Old Age.
Activity
Watching television Listening to radio Reading Visiting neighbors Visiting friends & relatives Using telephone Religious services Association attendance Association membership
0.09 0.19 0.04 0.28 0.43 0.18 0.33 0.43 0.50
0.20 0.03 0.35
Happiness and Social Participation in Aging1 Marshall J. Graney, PhD2
significance of social activities for T HEwell-being in old age has been a topic of sustained interest among gerontologists. As a result, the relationship between social activity and happiness (as a criterion of well-being) has been frequently studied. Some of the earliest research in social gerontology takes this relationship as a research problem (Morgan, 1937; Landis, 1940). Interest in this matter has continued over time (Cavan, Burgess, Havighurst, & Goldhamer, 1949; Havighurst & Albrecht, 1953), and continued to motivate research to the present (Bley, Goodman, Dye, & Hard, 1972; Bultena & Oyler, 1971; Palmore, 1968; and others). The primary objective of the present study was to clarify and extend findings from past research by focusing specifically (and exclusively) on happiness as a criterion of well-being in analysis of longitudinal data on the social activities of a sample of elderly women. Several conceptualizations of well-being have been developed and introduced over the years, and the two most frequently used are morale and adjustment. Use of these two concepts (and others) has involved implicit or explicit assumptions that these ways of conceptualizing wellbeing were either synonymous with happiness or that happiness was a major factor in them. These assumptions may not be justified, and a case can be made for the usefulness of 'The research reported here was supported under a NIH training grant through the Midwest Council for Social Research in Aging, Institute for Community Studies, Kansas City, MO. Thanks are also due to Donald G. McTavish and Gregory P. Stone for their advice and helpful comments. 'Dept. of Sociology, Wichita State Univ., Wichita, 67208.
definitions and operational specifications for such concepts that would allow for their independence from each other. If empirical measures of such concepts prove to be related in further research, then the causal priorities among them becomes a research topic for its own sake (Graney & Graney, 1973). However, morale and adjustment are not the only criteria of well-being that have been considered in social research. Continuities with past research are maintained by many studies which seek to establish empirical connections between several conceptualizations of older people's well-being and their socially significant activities. Instead of attempting to explicitly study a global concept like well-being, these and related studies have generally defined particular criteria of well-being, such as morale (Lawton, 1972, 1975; Rubenstein, 1971); personal adjustment (Cavan, et al., 1949); psychological well-being (Havens, 1968; Neugarten, 1972); life satisfaction (Bell, 1974; Spreitzer & Snyder, 1974; Tobin & Neugarten, 1961), and so on. In current usage none of these concepts is synonymous with happiness, but each criterion of well-being includes happiness as a significant part of its conceptual definition. Research on the relationship between social activity and happiness bears on all of the studies cited above, and vice versa. As is the case with all products of human effort, the research projects that have pursued these interests have been vulnerable to substantial methodological criticisms, and some have improved on others. Nevertheless, problems of 701
Downloaded from http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on May 30, 2015
This paper reports on a 4-year longitudinal study of 60 elderly women. Data about their happiness and social activities were collected using the Affect Balance Scale and nine measures of socially relevant activities, including three measures of media use, three of interpersonal interaction, and three of activities in voluntary associations. Direct relationships between happiness and social activity among elderly people were found in analysis of these data. This finding was not spurious according to longitudinal data: activity increments were associated with happiness and decrements with unhappiness. Although these findings describe the over-all picture, changes in activities may be more important to happiness among the most elderly persons interviewed than others.
702
GRANEY
The use of longitudinal data, in conjunction with the ABS, represented an attempt in this study to use current techniques to extend the long-standing tradition of research on social activity and happiness in old age and in aging. METHODS
Subjects Sixty elderly women, aged 62 to 89 years at first contact, were selected from the rosters of a metropolitan Housing and Redevelopment Authority to constitute a panel of interview respondents. All were initially in good health,
able to keep house, and lived alone. Because of difficulties in securing a representative number of elderly men it was decided that the sample would be composed of women only. Of the original 60, 46 survived, were locatable, and agreed to be interviewed again after a period of 4 years. Forty-four of the 46 gave usable responses to the 29 questions described below and analyzed in the following sections of this article. Each respondent was asked to recall her date of birth, rather than her chronological age, to minimize response errors. Using this information, ages were computed in data analysis. For analysis, the sample was split into three parts according to age: youngest, middle, and oldest; each as nearly equal in size to the others as possible (youngest, 16 persons aged 66 to 75 years; middle, 13 persons aged 77 to 81 years; oldest, 17 persons aged 82 to 92 years). Procedure Graney's (1973) revision of the ABS was used to measure happiness in this study. In using this ten-item scale all interviewees were asked to respond to five questions about feelings of happiness (or positive affect) alternated with five questions about feelings of unhappiness (or negative affect). An ABS score for each respondent was obtained by adding the sum of agreements with positive scale items to the negative sum of agreements with negative items. As one might expect, the middle of the range of observed scores was near zero, and 3 respondents obtained this score. Seventeen others were only one point away from this score, and all 20 of these persons were assigned to a middle category with respect to happiness. Approximately the same number of persons scored above this middle range as below it. Eleven persons expressed a majority of positive feelings, and 13 a majority of negative feelings. Social participation. — Nine questions about social participation were asked at each of two interviews using the same questions each time, but with a temporal separation of 4 years between repetitions. Of the nine questions, three concerned media use, three concerned interpersonal interaction, and three concerned participation in voluntary associations. The media-use questions measured the extent of the interviewee's use of television and radio, as well as amount of time devoted to reading books, newspapers, and magazines. Measures of interpersonal interaction included frequency of
Downloaded from http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on May 30, 2015
validity and interpretation have remained due to difficulties of operationalizing concepts, measurement, and analysis. Yet, both early and more recent research findings have usually cross-validated one another in the sense that their findings, more often than not, confirm each other. It has been found that older persons who are the most active seem happiest. This is true when happiness is conceptualized and measured in a variety of ways, ranging from subjective judges' ratings to objective and formal questionnaire scales. That is to say, with few exceptions, happiness among the aged (or successful aging, morale, life satisfaction, selfesteem, and so on) correlates positively with social activity in many studies (for example, see Kutner, Fanshel, Togo, & Langer, 1956; Palmore, 1968; and many others). One methodological criticism of much of the previous research on this topic has been its almost exclusive reliance on inferences about the process of aging based on cross-sectional analysis of data. Another criticism has focused on inappropriate ways of measuring happiness. Such criticisms have often seemed justified, because of the availability of more acceptable and rigorous procedures. The validity of widely used happiness scales has been a particularly serious methodological problem (Britton, 1964; Britton & Mather, 1958). Although we cannot claim to have solved this problem, this research project used a happiness scale, the Affect Balance Scale (ABS), whose validity has been studied with an intensity previously unknown (Bradburn, 1969; Bradburn & Caplovitz, 1965). Recently a validity study of the ABS confirmed its usefulness for applications with older people (Moriwaki, 1974). The form of the ABS used in this research project incorporated relatively minor but potentially important modifications to the original form to adapt it for use with older people (Graney, 1973).
703
HAPPINESS AND SOCIAL PARTICIPATION Table I. Measures of Social Participation.
Activity Category
Question Low Activity
(N)
Moderate Activity
(N)
High Activity
(N)
2 or less less than 1 less than 1 less than daily
(3D
more than 2 to 5 1 to 2
(29) (31) (20)
(30) (28)
Visiting friends & relatives
monthly or less
(27)
more than S more than 2 more than 3 more than once a day more than weekly
Telephone calls (daily) Religious services Voluntary association: Attendance Voluntary association: Membership
2 or less never
5 or more weekly or more
(15) (43)
regularly
(27)
2 or more
(20)
Hours: Television (daily) Hours: Radio (daily) Hours: Reading (daily) Visiting neighbors
(27) (49) (30)
Ito3 about once a day
(26) (23)
(34)
3 to 4
(27)
(28)
sometimes
never
(47)
sometimes
(21) (10)
none
(44)
one
(28)
face-to-face interaction with nearby neighbors as well as with friends and relatives who lived beyond walking distance of the interviewee's residence. In addition, data were also collected on frequency of telephone use. Participation in voluntary associations was measured with questions about attendance at religious services as well as questions about maintenance of memberships and attendance activity in other relatively formal associations. On the basis of their empirical distributions, the responses for each of these nine measures were classified into low, moderate, and high activity categories of as nearly equal size as possible for analysis and presentation of findings, as shown in Table 1. The precise wording of the questions used regarding social participation is published elsewhere (Graney & Graney, 1974). RESULTS
The questions in the ABS were used in the second wave of interviews, so it was possible to study the correlation between happiness and both current activity level (in old age) and changes in activity level over a period of time (in aging). Examination of current activity levels showed that (with only a couple of exceptions) happiness and social activity were directly related in these data, confirming what has been found in other cross-sectional studies. Table 2 shows these relationships between happiness and social activities in old age for the entire sample. According to these findings, the current levels of activity reported in six of the nine measures of social participation were significantly related to happiness at the conventional (p(a) = 0.05) level of statistical significance, and a seventh was close to statistical significance with p(a) = 0.06.
(26)
Table 2. Happiness and Social Activity in Old Age.
Activity
Watching television Listening to radio Reading Visiting neighbors Visiting friends & relatives Using telephone Religious services Association attendance Association membership
0.09 0.19 0.04 0.28 0.43 0.18 0.33 0.43 0.50
0.20 0.03 0.35
