Markus H Schafer

• University of Toronto

Volunteer service is an integral part of civic life in America. Prior research consistently finds that highly religious people spend the most time volunteering, but few studies assess the role of religious stability and change through the life course. This study focuses on exposure to religiosity in childhood and the (dis)continuity of religiosity...

Objectives: Research among older adults reveals that the loss of core network members is a risk factor for loneliness. Still, it is not clear whether all such losses induce similar levels of loneliness, particularly as network members are distributed at varied geographic distances. Neither is it clear whether tie addition-the other ubiquitous aspe...

Objectives People’s partners and spouses often provide a wide range of essential emotional and practical support. As crucial as they may be, a non-trivial segment of the older population appears to limit close discussions to their partner alone, a phenomenon we term “partner network exclusivity.” This network structure could leave people vulnerable...

Increasing evidence points to the salience of early life experiences in shaping health inequalities, but scant research has considered the role of institutional resources as buffers in this relationship. Health care systems in particular are an understudied yet important context for the generation of inequalities from childhood into adulthood. This...

Background and Objectives Expectations across a variety of life domains appear to shape the aging process, giving weight to the role of self-fulfilling prophecies in later life. Sexuality is one area where the power of expectations is not well understood. We investigated whether 10-year sexual expectations were associated with sexual satisfaction a...

Relying on the age segregation theory (limited contact between age groups), this study examined the temporal reciprocal associations between age integration—the inclusion of older and younger people in one’s personal network—and one's self-perceptions of aging (SPA). Data came from the 2014 and 2017 waves of the German Ageing Survey and focused on...

The growth of solo living has important implications for the rising “loneliness epidemic” among older adults. This study considers whether two forms of social connectedness—extra-household core discussion networks and formal social participation—buffer the loneliness associated with living alone. Our study uses data from two surveys (National Socia...

Objective The growth of solo living has important implications for the rising “loneliness epidemic” among older adults. This study considered whether two forms of social connectedness—extra-household core discussion networks and social participation—buffer the loneliness associated with living alone. Method Our study used data from two surveys (Na...

Objective: The growth of solo living has important implications for the rising-loneliness epidemic‖ among older adults. This study considered whether two forms of social connectedness-extra-household core discussion networks and social participation-buffer the loneliness associated with living alone. (n = 110,817). Harmonizing measures across data...

While research in the United States reveals favorable associations between religiosity and well-being during childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, whether childhood religiosity improves flourishing among U.S. adults remains unclear. Following a life-course approach, we examine whether childhood religiosity, measured in terms of the importance of re...

Objectives: This article evaluates whether couples’ religious similarity is consequential for the health of older married men and women. Alternatively, we examine whether women’s religiosity alone is health-protective to their husbands. Methods: Using dyadic data from the US National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, a representative sample o...

Adult children are key confidants for their aging parents, often providing emotional and advisory supports. Still, adult children are not a guaranteed presence in older people's core discussion networks. Geographical distance is a leading explanation for why some children are excluded from the confidant network, but we hypothesize that certain pare...

Drawing from theory and research on the role of social networks in promoting or undermining preventative public health measures, this article considers how structural, compositional and functional aspects of older adults’ close social networks are associated with HIV testing in the context of rural South Africa. Analyses use data from the populatio...

This study considers whether the personal networks of older South African people living with HIV (PLHIV) differ from those without HIV. Using recent survey data (N = 5059), results suggest that PLHIV reported more core network members than their peers without HIV (IRR 1.08; 95% CI 1.03, 1.13), but were equally likely to receive emotional support fr...

This study considered the role of adult children in the core networks of U.S. older adults with varying levels of functional health. Taking a multidimensional perspective of the ego network system, we considered (a) presence of child(ren) in the network, (b) contact with children network members, and (c) embeddedness of children within the network....

This study explores the potential long-term health effects of religiosity in the childhood home. Analyses use retrospective childhood data from the MIDUS survey linked to National Death Index records from 1995 to 2014. Findings from Cox proportional hazard models suggest that children brought up in highly religious households have a higher risk of...

Touch is an important element of human social interaction linked to various dimensions of well-being, but we know little of how it is distributed among older adults. This study considers whether greeting/affectionate touch is a function of characteristics such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Data come from Wave 1 (2005–2006) of the NSHAP...

Past research points to the importance of couple-level religious similarity for multiple dimensions of older adults’ partnership quality and stability, but we have a limited understanding of whether religious homogamy matters for the well-being of seniors. This study uses dyadic data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP),...

Relying on the age segregation theory (limited contact between the generations), this study examined the temporal associations between the age composition of one’s social ties and one’s self-perceptions of aging (SPA). Data came from the 2014 and 2017 waves of the German Ageing Survey (DEAS). Age composition of the network was assessed as the numbe...

Adult children are key members of their aging parents’ close social network, often providing emotional and advisory supports. Still, adult children are not a guaranteed presence in older people’s core discussion networks. Geographical distance is a leading explanation for why some children are excluded from the confidant network, but we hypothesize...

Objectives: We examine whether childhood family well-being is associated with cognitive functioning and to what extent the association between the family context and cognitive functioning is explained by adulthood resources. Methods: Data are drawn from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project Wave 3 (2015/2016; N = 3361). We measured co...

Existing research on the life course origins of adult health has extensively examined the influence of childhood socioeconomic conditions, family structure, and exposure to trauma. Left unexplored are the potential long-term health effects of sociocultural exposures, such as religiosity at earlier phases of the life course. Integrating life course...

The long-term influence of childhood economic and social exposures on adult health and well-being is well-known. Most childhood circumstances transpire in or near the home, yet research has largely neglected how early exposures shape people’s experience of their residential context in adulthood. To help address this gap, we draw on retrospective lo...

Age segregation—the widespread separation of people by age—is deemed by many gerontologists a major problem in contemporary societies. Contributing to this dialog, the current exploratory article examines the presence of non-kin members in European seniors’ close personal networks. Specifically, we document network connections to people outside of...

Considerable work has documented that positive childhood memories, especially childhood happiness, predict better health among young adults. However, it is not known whether growing up happy has enduring health consequences across the life course. Using two waves of the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (2010-2011 and 2015-2016; N = 1,...

Self-neglect includes persistent inattention to personal hygiene and the conditions of one’s immediate living environment and is known to be associated with an increased risk of mortality among older adults. Although previous studies have shown that many individual factors predict self-neglect, neighborhood characteristics have received much less a...

Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, Wave 6 in 2015), this paper examines the structure of older adults’ core discussion networks in terms of their geographical outreach. We also examine how far respondents live from their friends, and how such a connection is conditioned by the presence of a proximate child in the ne...

HIV/AIDS has had a substantial social and economic impact on Sub-Saharan Africa, and research is only beginning to examine the prevalence and consequences of HIV infection among older adults in this region. Though informal social networks provide crucial resources for older people managing health problems, little is known about how the form and fun...

Though the risk of chronic disease and disability accelerates once adults are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, researchers have long suspected that economic, social, and institutional variation — even among high-income Western nations — may powerfully influence the likelihood that people remain healthy at advanced ages. This study builds on comparative...

This study builds on research into global aging, by offering a multiple-indicator test of whether national healthcare system quality modifies the association between age and major illness. Recent individual-level data on morbidity among respondents aged 50 or older (16 countries; 2014 European Social Survey) are merged with nation-level healthcare...

Rationale and objective: Guided by stress process theory, this study investigates the association between the economic downturn and chronic pain interference, as well as the role of two future-oriented buffering mechanisms (anticipated stressor duration and pre-recession financial optimism) in this relationship. This research integrates both an ob...

The private home is a crucial site in the aging process, yet the upkeep of this physical space often poses a challenge for community-dwelling older adults. Previous efforts to explain variation in disorderly household conditions have relied on individual-level characteristics, but ecological perspectives propose that home environments are inescapab...

The private home is a crucial site in the aging process, yet the upkeep of this physical space often poses a challenge for community-dwelling older adults. Previous efforts to explain variation in disorderly household conditions have relied on individual-level characteristics, but ecological perspectives propose that home environments are inescapab...

Objectives: This study examines the role of work-related perceived age discrimination on women's mental health over the life course and tests whether financial strain mediates this relationship. Methods: Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women (1967-2003), we employ nested growth curve models to evaluate whether perceived age disc...

Expectations regarding the work hours of older workers have changed over time. This article examines Canadian workers in their pre-retirement years to identify patterns in work hour preferences by gender - and whether work hour mismatch predicts late-stage workforce transitions. Findings from a national sample of Canadian workers show that slightly...

Many older adults undertake adaptive efforts following health transitions to secure a social network environment conducive to resource provision and support. We hypothesized that people undergoing functional decline add family members to their core networks at disproportionate rates. This paper uses data from three waves of the National Social Life...

As the industrialized world faces a rapidly aging population, it has become increasingly important to understand the factors that influence the well-being of older persons. In this regard, many scholars have emphasized the importance of social connectedness. Various theories seek to explain social connectedness in later life, particularly as it app...

Life-course transitions among older adults often produce a reshuffling of social network members. Moving is a common experience for U.S. seniors, but relatively little is known about how core networks change amid the relocation process. Drawing on longitudinal data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, the present study examines...

Becoming unable to drive can have important implications for sustaining social engagement in later life and may contribute to a downward cycle of social isolation and health decline. This chapter presents results from a recent study that expands existing knowledge by considering basic structural features of people’s close networks, including size a...

Though religion matters greatly to many U.S. adults, it is widely considered a touchy conversational topic. Understanding how religious issues are talked about with others can elucidate a key interpersonal manifestation of Americans’ faith, yet existing research has largely overlooked the phenomena of religious discussion in social networks. This a...

The onset of disability is believed to undermine social connectedness and raise the risk of social isolation, yet spatial environments are seldom considered in this process. This study examines whether unruly home and neighborhood conditions intensify the association between disability onset and several dimensions of social connectedness. I incorpo...

This article examines whether disorderly household conditions and bodily self-presentation predict mortality, above and beyond four sets of variables conceptually linked to both death and disorder. Data come from 2005/2006 and 2010/2011 waves of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project. We used naturalistic observation of respondents' ho...

It is widely acknowledged that informal social ties provide older persons with many resources that serve to protect and improve their levels of health and well-being. Most studies on this topic, however, ignore the month or season of the year during which data was accumulated. This study proposes two hypotheses to explain seniors' social network re...

Objectives: Prior research points to the importance of couple-level religious similarity for multiple dimensions of partnership quality and stability but few studies have investigated whether this association holds for older couples. Method: The current article uses dyadic data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a...

Background and objectives: This study examines whether neighborhood and household disorder is associated with sexual interest among partnered seniors. Research design and methods: Analyses use dyadic data from Wave 2 of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a nationally representative sample of community-dwelling older adu...

Triadic closure is the common tendency for connections to emerge between people's social network ties. This phenomenon has clear implications for congregational networks and may underlie many of the social benefits associated with church involvement. Less documented in the sociology of religion, is the occurrence of triadic closure involving congre...

Life course studies have ushered in unprecedented scientific interest not only in specific periods of human lives but also in the long-term processes associated with growing older. Theories and conceptual frameworks have emerged to help scholars splice pieces of the life course together, but the need for conceptual clarity remains. Concepts such as...

For close to two decades now, research on older adults' social connectedness has been expanding on conceptualizations of social integration that focus on roles and activities in order to further examine the nature of older adults' " social networks" A social network refers to a defined set of social actors - in this case, individuals - and the soci...

This paper utilizes a layered context approach to examine how neighborhood and household conditions are associated with the objective and subjective well-being of older adults. Using two waves of data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (n=2261), we assess subjective mental health through self-reported measures of perceived str...

Objective: We investigate whether obesity is associated with sexual activity, sexual frequency, and the range of sexual behaviors in heterosexual older couples. We assess to what extent associations between obesity and sexuality are explained by physical, psychological, and sexual health, and by relationship quality. Method: We use data from 1,698...

A vast literature demonstrates how personal networks mirror and reproduce broader patterns of social inequality. The availability of key resources through informal mechanisms is an important way that high-status Americans retain a host of social advantages. Largely absent from this account of social capital inequality, however, is an explicit tempo...

This study examines temporal trends in the self-rated health of Chinese adults from 1990 to 2012. Concentration on this particular period in Chinese history provides insights into the health implications of China’s massive societal transformation induced by economic reform. A series of cross-classified random effects models were estimated predictin...

Drawing from life course, social networks, and developmental social psychology scholarship, this article considers how advice transmission varies across age groups and examines the age-contingent associations between advice-giving and life meaning. Binomial and ordered logistic regression using the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study (n=2583) rev...

Drawing from cumulative inequality theory, we examine the relationship between childhood disadvantage and health problems in adulthood. Using two waves of data from Midlife Development in the United States, we investigate whether childhood disadvantage is associated with adult disadvantage, including fewer social resources, and the effect of lifelo...

Past research demonstrates a phenotypic relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult health problems. Explanations of this association usually point to either: (a) a direct causal link, whereby exposure to early stress disrupts biological functioning during sensitive periods of development; or (b) an indirect effect operating through socio...

Cancer is a life-changing condition for many American seniors, and a growing body of literature is assessing the mental health implications of living with the disease. This article builds from the well-known buffering hypothesis with insights from recent cancer research to investigate whether social networks moderate the association between cancer...

This study examines social ties within a community of retirement residents to examine how health influences patterns of social interaction. Drawing from a social fields perspective, I anticipated that health would emerge as a key form of status. I hypothesised that this would manifest in the healthiest residents receiving a disproportionate share o...

Objectives: This study considers the association between personal network density and risk of elder mistreatment among American adults. Method: Using egocentric network data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, we employ logistic and negative binomial regression to predict recent experience of elder mistreatment. We further...

A long line of research maintains that physical proximity increases interpersonal contact and boosts the likelihood of voluntary relationships. Proximity effects, however, may be modified by additional, valued characteristics that distinguish people from one another, such as physical health. I examine this interaction between proximity and assortat...

This article considers whether the density of a person's social network is related to his/her moral attitudes toward infidelity. Integrating recent sociological thinking on moral schemas with network theory's insights about deviance and structural independence, I employ data from a representative sample of American men aged 57–85. Findings indicate...

A large literature is currently contesting the impact of religion on prosocial behavior. As a window into this discussion, I examine the close social networks of American adults and consider whether religious traditionalists are more likely than other network members to supply several basic forms of social support. Analysis of the Portraits of Amer...

This study considers the long-term health consequences of child maltreatment. Distinct from previous research, we examine the effects of maltreatment in the context of more general parental evaluations. Analyses used retrospective and current data from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) study. A considerable proportion of middle-...

Objective: People have a special capacity to live simultaneously in both chronological and biographical time. In this article, we examine reports of life satisfaction that span past, present, and future, considering how perceived changes in certain life domains are associated with overall perceived life trajectories. Methods: Analyses use men an...

This article integrates life course and stress process perspectives to better understand the connections between early life victimization, hardship in adulthood, and religious turning points among middle-age Americans. I identified Christian “born-again” transformations as an empirical case, as this faith transition (1) is relatively commonplace in...

Authority in the workplace has its benefits. It is well-established that job authority generally yields higher earnings. In this study, the authors ask: Does that observation extend to other nonpecuniary rewards in the workplace? Using data from a 2011 representative sample of Canadian workers, results suggest it does—but there are some social stat...

Prayer is often an interpersonal phenomenon. It represents not only a form of social support shared between or among people, but also a means of embedding an unobservable actor (God) within a conventionally observable social network. This study considers whether the receipt of intercessory prayer from close network ties is associated with future-or...

College-educated adults are healthier than other people in the United States, but selection bias complicates our understanding of how education influences health. This article focuses on the possibility that the health benefits of college may vary according to childhood (mis)fortune and people's propensity to attain a college degree in the first pl...

College-educated adults are healthier than other people in the United States, but selection bias complicates our understanding of how education influences health. This article focuses on the possibility that the health benefits of college may vary according to childhood (mis)fortune and people's propensity to attain a college degree in the first pl...

Using a four-wave cross-sectional repeated dataset spanning 17 years (World Value Survey, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2007), this research examines changes in work centrality in China during the period of economic reform. The article utilizes a recently developed methodology, hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models, to disentangle the effects of age, pe...

Objective: This article traces the influence of early misfortune on somatic and psychological symptoms, examining whether the health disadvantages endure and/or worsen over a decade. Method: The study uses two waves of data from the Midlife Development in the United States study. Structural equation models are used to assess change in somatic and p...

Despite the recent and rapid worldwide rise in body mass index (BMI), little empirical research outside the developed world has systematically considered the role of cohorts in inaugurating emergent biomorphic disparities. This study integrates aspects of the life course perspective (attention to age- and cohort-level influences) with fundamental c...

Objective To address the inconsistent findings on whether childhood misfortune increases adult cancer occurrence. Methods This study uses longitudinal data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) that first sampled 3,032 respondents aged 25 to 74 during 1995-1996. A series of logistic regressions were estimated...

This article tests the hypothesis that health influences older adults' position within a defined social structure. Building on a recent synthesis of social gerontology and network analysis, good health was expected to be associated with more network constraint and less network integration-two indicators of autonomy and access to social resources an...

As a stigmatizing condition, obesity may lead to the internalization of devalued labels and threats to self-concept. Modified labeling theory suggests that the effects of stigma may outlive direct manifestations of the discredited characteristic itself. This article considers whether obesity's effects on self-concept linger when obese youth enter t...

This article examines whether self-reported racial discrimination is associated with greater use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and assesses whether the effects of reported racial discrimination are specific to the setting in which the unfair treatment occurred (i.e., medical or nonmedical settings). Data were drawn from the Nation...

The overlap between social networks and health represents a key area of research in social gerontology. Set in a continuing care retirement community, this research focuses on how health is related to outgoing and incoming reports of social interaction among residents. Study participants (n = 123) were given the RAND 36-item Health Survey and asked...

Medical sociologists hold that social conditions generate disparities across a host of health conditions through exposure to a variety of more proximate risk factors. Though distal and proximal causes jointly influence disease, the nature of risk accumulation may differ appreciably by the link of a proximal cause to the outcome in question. This pa...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether childhood misfortune reduces the likelihood of being disease free in adulthood. This article used a sample of 3,000+ American adults, aged 25-74, who were first interviewed in 1995 and reinterviewed in 2005. Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds of avoiding disease at the first wave and r...

Obesity is widely recognized as a health risk, but it also represents a disadvantaged social position. Viewing body weight within the framework of stigma and its effects on life chances, we examine how perceived weight-based discrimination influences identity and physical health. Using national survey data with a 10-year longitudinal follow-up, we...

The position that people take on moral issues, such as infidelity, can be influenced by abstract principles (e.g., religious ideals) but also by their own relational experience. Conservative religious orientation provides clear moral prescripts about sexual behavior, but what happens when there is perceived strain within one's actual, non-hypotheti...

Low socioeconomic status and high levels of body mass are two risk factors for elevated C-reactive protein, a biomeasure signifying inflammation. Though past research identifies the additive effect of these particular risk factors, this study examines their interactive effects to uncover whether body mass index exacerbates or levels the detrimental...

Adversity early in life may alter pathways of aging, but what interpretive processes can soften the blow of early insults? Drawing from cumulative inequality theory, the authors analyze trajectories of life evaluations and then consider whether early adversity offsets favorable expectations for the future. Results reveal that early adversity contri...

The passage of time is fundamentally experienced through people’s interaction with their social worlds. Life-course scholars acknowledge the multiple aspects of time-based experience but have given little attention to age identity in a dynamic context. Drawing from a stress-process model, we expected that turbulence within people’s family relations...

Drawing on past studies of age identity, this article examined whether feeling older was associated with more pessimistic views about cognitive aging. Using respondents aged 55 years and older in the Midlife Development in the United States study, we estimated a series of linear regression models to predict people's dispositions toward their cognit...

Past research suggests that sustaining a young identity helps adults maintain a greater sense of well-being. The experience of subjective aging, however, is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but stems from lifelong developmental experiences. Drawing from writings on the life course and self-concept, I consider how parental death in childhood shapes sub...

The demographic study of aging in comparative context covers wide intellectual and disciplinary ground. Aging involves social, behavioral and biological processes; thus, scholars studying aging investigate issues ranging from genetic contributions to chronic disease susceptibility (Olshansky et al. 2005) to the effects of economic growth on elders’...

There has been a substantial increase in the number of aging-related educational programs in the United States over the last two decades. Many of these programs utilize an experiential-learning approach, such as intergenerational service-learning, to train gerontology students to work effectively with older adults. This paper presents a model of tr...

Consistent with a new genre of research on life-course analyses of health-service use, this study explores the consequences of long-term exposure to a risk factor. Drawing from cumulative-disadvantage theory, the study examines whether obesity, especially chronic obesity, increases hospitalization admission and length of stay. Analyses make use of...

Avoidable hospitalizations are considered to result from conditions that are preventable with timely and effective ambulatory care. We examined whether obesity, particularly long-term obesity, is associated with risk for and frequency of avoidable hospital stays. Data were drawn from the First National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Epidem...