Chapter 2

florence ferguson

Types of research on aging and how to study it

Meta Theoretical models

• Mechanistic

  • Nurture

    • Something you learn

  • looks at body like a machine

  • Quantitative data

    • 50 yard dash

  • Look at large phenomena and chunk it

    • what does aging do to the mind

      • Quick response

      • memory

      • compartmentalize info

    • Development has no endpoint and comparing to younger age ranges

• Organismic

  • Nature

    • How the body responds

  • How fast your metabolism works when you’re 40 v 60

  • Good habits

    • Eat

    • exercise

    • etc

    • will increase the quality of aging

  • One of the main issues we see is a lot of these individuals lose crazy amounts of muscle mass

    

    • More sedentary = less muscle

      • This leads to complications such as

        • sugar gets stored in muscle mass as glycogen

        • the storage for sugar is less

        • which can lead to insulin resistance and potentially/ more likely diabetes

        • If you’re not physically active (as a woman)

          • Powerlifting

          • Crossfit

          • yoga

          • pilates

        • Menopause will demineralize your bones and increase the chance of death when you break your hip at 65 ☹

      • Exercise helps with your brain

        • Decreases decline in cognitive function

        • Learn new things and workout

    • They look at Qualitative research

      • looking at individual

      • gives you a lot of information about someone’s POV

      • You can’t generalize an experience

• Contextual

  • Look at human behavior in context

  • It will be easy to misdiagnose someone if you look at the information out of context

  • if someone has grown up with the idea of abandonment and rejection then they are bound to repeat those patterns if they don’t seek professional help

• Lifespan development model

  • development is ongoing!!

  • Takes the contextual approach and expands it

  • history is going to impact someone/group/generation of people

    • war

    • pandemic

    • famine

    • Phones

  • mixed methods of gathering information

  • Multidisciplinary field

    • Medicine

    • psychology

    • Sociology

  • Sexuality in the elderly

    • STD increase in elderly ☹

    • Viagra is their bff

    • condom is off 😜

    • Sex ed for Mildred (fake elderly name I’ll use for the rest of the semester)

  • Development is plastic

    • It morphs/changes/adapts

Everything is a mix but some approaches focus on nature, nurture, or a mix of the two

correlation doesn’t equal causation 💅

Forms of Research

• Qualitative

  • It can’t be generalized

  • Personal experience

    • Relative Phenomenology

      • Buyer beware

        • Be careful bro

      • literature is skewed

        • If you’re gonna have a study done and you want to study a specific variable and you’re controlling for certain variables and you’re trying to find what coorelates

          • The more you control the less applicable it is in REAL life

          • solid correlation and poor application

• Quantitative

  • Can be generalized

  • Numbers

  • Experiement

    • Random Sampling NEEDED

    • Variables

      • Control variable

      • If you have x → y

        • X causes y

        • aka you have causation

    • When we deal with people we can’t do experiments because we can’t randomize people

  • Quasiexperimental designs

    • You CANT get causality when you do this

    • R = correlation

      • at most, you’ll get it

      • The relationship between two variables

    • Ex) Ice cream consumption increases in the summer

      • Correlation? YES

      • Causation? NO because heat doesn’t mean we’re magically gonna eat icecream

• • Quasiexperimental designs continued

    • Can be positive or negative

    • Negative

      • Inverse

      • Indirect

      • 75 and up is a strong negative

      • .25 is moderate

      • and below is mild

    • Positive

      • Direct

      • .75 and up is a strong positive

      • .25 is moderate

      • and below is mild

    • You CANNOT GIVE CAUSE AND EFFECT BUT THIS IS GOOD ENOUGH

    • 30 people per variable

      • more people = more ability to generalize

    • Sampling

      • people make fun of Freud

        • BECAUSE HE IS A FREAK

        • Sex and aggression are the main motivators according to him

        • He had a sampling error

        • Victorian Era

          • Sexually restrictive

          • Sexual expression was reserved for women of upper class

            • for making babies

          • Go hang with the friendly neighborhood prostitute (victorian era spiderman for women's sexuality)

          • The rule of thumb

            • you could beat your wife with a cane the length of approximately double your thumb

        • Women would go to Freud for talk therapy

          • only the upper-class could AFFORD to talk to him

          • and they had repressed sexuality

          • so the only thing they had was being horny and angry

          • So his sample was skewed

    • If the sample is limited then you can only generalize THAT sample

• Significance - you find a strong positive or negative correlation and it’s deemed important

  • The minor details get buried