M H Schafer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 17257 |
|---|---|
| NOME | M H Schafer |
| PRENOMES | M H |
| SOBRENOME | Schafer |
| ASSINATURA | SCHAFER M H |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8385-5068 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 78 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 427 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 78 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Higher educational attainment and later-life cognition
Palliative and end-of-life care as fragile collective accomplishment
What accompanies companionship? Reassessing personal networks and loneliness among young and older adults
The Co-Evolution of Personal Networks and Loneliness Following Widowhood
Drawing from the life-course framework and an integrated model of social resources and social costs, this article investigates (1) the dynamics of personal network changes, (2) their impact on loneliness following widowhood, and (3) the gender-specific effects of these changes. Analyzing panel data from the German Ageing Survey ( N = 7,012; observations = 20,816) using multi-level mixed-effects models, the study reveals a modest expansion in non-…
Poorer subjective hearing is associated with less frequent and more negative social interactions in older adults
These results support the possibility that impaired hearing may affect the quality of routine social interactions, potentially increasing the risk of social isolation and loneliness
Where Does It Hurt? A 4-S Model of Pain Onset and Recovery Across Body Sites Among Older Adults
Objectives Pain is an increasingly widespread problem for older adults, contributing to higher health care costs and lower quality of life. Though the prevalence of pain is well documented in national studies, less is known about where pain occurs in the body, and even less about the dynamic processes of onset and recovery. We examine the bodily distribution of pain and its covariates and propose a framework to systematize how pain sites remain s…
Reading between the ties
Loneliness negatively impacts on the well-being of older adults, especially those with small social networks. While expanding networks and participating in social activities are commonly associated with lower loneliness, these strategies are not always feasible for everyone. Solitary activities, such as reading, may offer an alternative by relating to the subjective experience of loneliness and promoting satisfaction with existing networks. Using…
Healthy eating in life course context
Shifts in American Religiosity and Spirituality from 1995 to 2014
This article examines the shifting landscape of American religiosity and spirituality alongside supposed declines in community life during recent decades. We leverage three waves of longitudinal US data spanning 1995-2014 to investigate whether adults' self-designations of religion/spirituality are associated with their sense of contribution to others and the extent of their perceived social connectedness. Overall, more adults became spiritual bu…
Faith and Volunteering at Midlife
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 into adulthood, as well as cases where people become more or less religious as adults. Drawing on na…
Age, Political Participation, and Political Context in Africa
The impact of political context on the age-participation association is nuanced in ways not anticipated by mainstream research on the developed West. Repressive regimes, while spurring engagement at younger ages, appear to disproportionately deter older Africans from political engagement, especially its riskiest forms. We conclude by calling for more country-comparative gerontological research with careful attention to contextual heterogeneity, p…
Social contact during the Covid-19 pandemic
On religious ambiguity
Keep around, drop, or revise? exploring what becomes of difficult ties in personal networks
Distance in Disconnection
The relationship between core network member losses and loneliness can significantly differ based on the nature of the lost connection and its geographic distance. Active rebalancing of one's core network following losses and proactive network expansion can serve as pivotal strategies to prevent loneliness for the aging population
Social network characteristics and HIV testing among older adults in South Africa
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 population-based Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa (HA…
The Long Arm of Childhood
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 research investigates associations between childhood disadvantage and adult morbidity and examines …
Keeping “In Touch”
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 study from the United States. Results reveal that women experienced more frequent touch relative to…
Isolation or Replenishment? The Case of Partner Network Exclusivity and Partner Loss in Later Life
This study provides new evidence that network replenishment following relationship disruptions is plausible even for those from precarious network settings. Nevertheless, widowhood produces patterns of vulnerability for a subset of older adults in partner-exclusive core networks
There at any distance? Geographic proximity and the presence of adult children in older Europeans’ core discussion networks
Understanding organ donation processes and structures in ontario
God, Father, Mother, Gender
Does Childhood Religiosity Delay Death
Couple Religiosity and Well-Being Among Older Adults in the United States
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 of 913 individuals ages 62-91 plus their marital partners, we perform latent-class analysis to separ…
Cumulative inequality theory for research on aging and the life course.
Childhood Disadvantage and Health Problems in Middle and Later Life
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 lifelong disadvantage on health problems measured at the baseline survey and a 10-year follow-up. Findings…
Children of Misfortune
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 contributes to more negative views of the past but rising expectations for the future. Early adversity als…
Childhood (Mis)fortune, Educational Attainment, and Adult Health
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 place. Several perspectives from life course sociology offer competing hypotheses as to whether the mo…
The Stigma of Obesity
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 consider whether perceptions of weight discrimination shape weight perceptions, whether perceived we…
Close Ties, Intercessory Prayer, and Optimism Among American Adults
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-oriented well-being. Analyses use social network module data from the Portraits of American Life Study…
Age Identity, Gender, and Perceptions of Decline
Age identity shapes cognitive aging dispositions, though the gendered nature of this relationship remains somewhat unclear. The findings give further evidence about the far-reaching implications of age identity for successful aging and suggest that future work can explicate how subjective aging processes may differ by gender
Religious Attendance and Physical Health in Later Life
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 models of health with literature on the health-protective effects of adult religiosity, we consider …
Does Embeddedness Protect? Personal Network Density and Vulnerability to Mistreatment Among Older American Adults
Results highlight how network-level phenomena can operate distinctively from dyadic mistreatment processes. Dense personal networks seem to provide structural protection against elder mistreatment, even as many offensive acts are committed by those that are close to the victim and relatively well embedded in their network
Age and the Tenses of Life Satisfaction
We find several notable differences between men and women, but the most telling differences emerge among women themselves across chronological time. For women, partner satisfaction becomes considerably more important across the age groups, whereas sex, contribution to others, and relationships with children all decrease in their importance for overall life satisfaction
The Rewards of Authority in the Workplace
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 status contingencies. In particular, the benefits of higher levels of job authority for job autonomy, ch…
Does Childhood Misfortune Increase Cancer Risk in Adulthood
Analyses revealed the importance of examining alternative specifications of childhood misfortune for men and women. Additive childhood misfortune predicted cancer for men only, whereas child abuse by parent of the same sex predicted cancer for men and women
Beyond the barriers
How Did Work Attitudes Change in Reform-Era China? Age, Period, and Cohort Effects on Work Centrality
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, period, and cohort. Results show that age has a curvilinear effect: work centrality increases up to mi…
Discussion networks, physician visits, and non-conventional medicine
The Divergent Mental Health Effects of Dashed Expectations and Unfulfilled Aspirations
Considerable work has shown that optimistic future orientations can be a resource for resilience across individuals’ lives. At the same time, research has shown little downside to “shooting for the stars” and failing. Here, we bring these competing insights to the study of lawyers’ careers, investigating the relationship between mental health and failure in achieving desired career advancement. To do this, we differentiate between expectations an…
Environmental disorder and functional decline among older adults
Schema via Structure? Personal Network Density and the Moral Evaluation of Infidelity
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 that men with the densest personal networks are least likely to condone infidelity. This associatio…
Trajectories of Body Mass and Self-Concept in Black and White Girls
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 the normal body mass range. Using longitudinal data from the National Growth and Health Study on 2,20…
Health and Network Centrality in a Continuing Care Retirement Community
Results are interpreted in light of status processes, which emerge in bounded social settings
Parental Death and Subjective Age
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 subjective age in adulthood. To examine the effects of maternal and paternal death on subjective age, I…
Compensatory Connections? Living Alone, Loneliness, and the Buffering Role of Social Connection Among Older American and European Adults
Extra-household connections are partial compensators, but do not seem to fully replace the ready companionship afforded by residential copresence in later life. Future research is needed to understand whether the efficacy of compensatory connections differs by gender, race/ethnicity, and across more diverse global regions
Workforce Transitions and Social Connectedness Among Older Adults in the United States
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 applies to workforce involvement. Among those theories, we engage the theories of activity-substitution…
Childhood Misfortune, Ultimate Redemption? A Stress Process-Life Course Analysis of Adult Born-Again Experiences
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 the American religious landscape and (2) makes direct claims concerning redemption and new life. A…
Age Identity in Context
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 and health declines would produce increases in subjective age. Family role transitions were also ex…
Obesity and Hospitalization over the Adult Life Course
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 hospital records abstracted over 20 years from a national survey of adults 41 to 77 years of age at …
Obesity and Hospitalization over the Adult Life Course
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 hospital records abstracted over 20 years from a national survey of adults 41 to 77 years of age at …
Gerontology's Greatest Hits
Objectives. This paper is based on research that explored the cultural construction of dying and death in nursing homes and assisted living facilities in a large Northeastern city. It focuses on direct care workers' responses to elders' dying and death within the facility.
Age Identity, Gender, and Perceptions of Decline
Age identity shapes cognitive aging dispositions, though the gendered nature of this relationship remains somewhat unclear. The findings give further evidence about the far-reaching implications of age identity for successful aging and suggest that future work can explicate how subjective aging processes may differ by gender
Parental Death and Subjective Age
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 subjective age in adulthood. To examine the effects of maternal and paternal death on subjective age, I…
Age Identity in Context
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 and health declines would produce increases in subjective age. Family role transitions were also ex…
Health and Network Centrality in a Continuing Care Retirement Community
Results are interpreted in light of status processes, which emerge in bounded social settings
The Stigma of Obesity
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 consider whether perceptions of weight discrimination shape weight perceptions, whether perceived we…
Distal and variably proximal causes
Ambiguity, Religion, and Relational Context
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-hypothetical relationship? The author tests a series of hypotheses about attitudes towards infidelity using a…
Children of Misfortune
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 contributes to more negative views of the past but rising expectations for the future. Early adversity als…
Does Childhood Misfortune Increase Cancer Risk in Adulthood
Analyses revealed the importance of examining alternative specifications of childhood misfortune for men and women. Additive childhood misfortune predicted cancer for men only, whereas child abuse by parent of the same sex predicted cancer for men and women
Childhood Misfortune and Adult Health
The results suggest an enduring-but not cascadic-effect of childhood abuse on adult health. There was little evidence that the consequences of early misfortune waned over the course of time or were less substantial for older adults; but neither did these early life experiences contribute to worsened symptoms over a decade of observation
Beyond the barriers
How Did Work Attitudes Change in Reform-Era China? Age, Period, and Cohort Effects on Work Centrality
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, period, and cohort. Results show that age has a curvilinear effect: work centrality increases up to mi…
Cohorts and Emerging Health Disparities
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 cause theory to investigate how BMI differences have unfurled in the Chinese population. We analyze g…
Do the Psychological Effects of Stigma Linger After Obese Adolescents Transition to Normal Weight
Trajectories of Body Mass and Self-Concept in Black and White Girls
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 the normal body mass range. Using longitudinal data from the National Growth and Health Study on 2,20…
Age and the Tenses of Life Satisfaction
We find several notable differences between men and women, but the most telling differences emerge among women themselves across chronological time. For women, partner satisfaction becomes considerably more important across the age groups, whereas sex, contribution to others, and relationships with children all decrease in their importance for overall life satisfaction
Childhood (Mis)fortune, Educational Attainment, and Adult Health
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 place. Several perspectives from life course sociology offer competing hypotheses as to whether the mo…
Discussion networks, physician visits, and non-conventional medicine
The Rewards of Authority in the Workplace
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 status contingencies. In particular, the benefits of higher levels of job authority for job autonomy, ch…
Close Ties, Intercessory Prayer, and Optimism Among American Adults
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-oriented well-being. Analyses use social network module data from the Portraits of American Life Study…
Diversity in action
Religiously Traditional, Unusually Supportive? Examining Who Gives, Helps, and Advises in Americans’ Close Networks
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 American Life Survey reveals three main findings. First, a majority of Americans—religious or not—count …
On the Locality of Asymmetric Close Relations
Findings suggest that relational inequalities associated with health are most pronounced when they are most local. I conclude by noting broader implications for the study of social networks, health, and physical space among older adults
Psychology (70 obras) · Sociology (47 obras) · Medicine (43 obras) · Health disparities and outcomes (41 obras) · Social Psychology (37 obras) · Developmental psychology (28 obras) · Gerontology (26 obras) · Demography (24 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Social Psychology (23 obras)