Americans' psychological health trajectories: analyses of survey data from the intergenerational studies

Abstract

'Survey data from the Intergenerational Studies are used here to examine two American generations' trajectories of psychological health. Original Intergenerational Studies members were born in either 1921 or 1929; their children were born between 1938 and 1982. Psychological health, measured via the self-report California Psychological Inventory, was assessed between 1954 and 2006 for the older generation and between 1983 and 2006 for the younger generation. The authors ask: What is the developmental path of psychological health for the older and younger generation, when data are analyzed separately, and what are the additional advantages of analyzing the two generations' data simultaneously? Application of longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling indicates that while data analyzed separately by generation are provocative, the additional advantages of analyzing data from both generations simultaneously are impressive: a more complex form of change was extracted, and valuable empirical estimates of generational differences in intercept, slope, and quadratic term were obtained.' (author's abstract)