This chapter presents a developmental perspective on stress in later life. It reviews the literature on age and the stress process, including appraisal processes, types of stress experienced, and health effects. The chapter describes the development of the Elders Life Stress Inventory and its use in three community surveys, the first in a California retirement community and the other two in a large, longitudinal panel in Boston. Inspection of the types of items on typical stress inventories reveals this assumption of egocentricity; items such as marriage, divorce, job changes, relocations, or car trouble all focus on problems that occur to the self. As L. Pearlin and H. Turner pointed out, relatively little is known about stress processes in later-life families. In the California and Boston samples, concern for others’ problems tended to be modestly correlated with health outcomes, suggesting that the relative cost of nonegocentric stress is not that great in these older adults who have relatively high resource levels.
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