Older Women

Older Women Sheila Peace Mary Ann Ruffing-Rahal and Judy Anderson, Factors associated with qualitative well-being in older women, Journal of Women and Aging, 6, 3 (1994), 3-18. The research reported here has dual purposes. At an academic level, it seeks to identify key factors associated with the well-being of older women living in the community through the development of a regression model. At a practical level, the authors wish to use the findings to improve community health-promotion services. Their starting point is a desire to understand the 'gendered experience of aging', given that in American society older women when compared to older men live longer, are less advantaged being more likely to suffer disabling health conditions, and are more likely to live alone, suffer multiple losses and live on a low income. As a consequence, older women are seen as important targets for health-promotion and preventative strategies. The research builds upon earlier work in which Ruffing-Rahal developed her own ' Ecological well-being model' based on three core themes by which individuals pursue meaning in everyday life: activity, affirmation and synthesis (see Ruffing-Rahal 1989). The model led to the development of a measurement instrument, 'The Integration Inventory II ' , a 37-item Likert scale (Ruffing-Rahal 1991). Construct validity of this measure has been undertaken in relation to the revised Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale, the Spiritual Weil-Being Scale, and self-ratings on four well-being dimensions: health, comparison with others, life satisfaction, and happiness. The uniqueness of'The Integration Inventory I I ' is said to lie with its 'incorporation of psychological and spiritual dimensions of qualitative experience'. As such it forms the dependent well-being variable for this study. The identification of the key factors of well-being was undertaken through secondary analysis of interview data collected in 1990 during the development of the measurement instrument. The interviews were undertaken with a purposive sample of'older adults living within 200 miles of a major Midwestern city'. The secondary analysis was carried out using data for the 161 older women from the original study. These terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X00002907 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 14 Dec 2019 at 05:37:52, subject to the Cambridge Core