Psychosocial Factors Associated With Longevity in the United States

Article Review
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Article Review
In their article, Ailshire and Crimmins (2011) compare the influence of social relationships, satisfaction, and loneliness on the aging experience in adults who have lived beyond 90 years with that it has on adults who are in their 70s. This paper will summarize the study and examine the reliability in terms of the quality of insights generated from the research.
A traditional approach to examining the quality of life in old age was mainly based on the biomedical paradigm, where the quality of life was attributed to the extent to which an older adult can avoid disease and prevent their cognitive and physical decline (Ailshire & Crimmins, 2011). With time, gerontologists have reexamined the approach driven by the view that aging should be considered a multidimensional concept that is influenced by other elements such as psychosocial factors (Ailshire & Crimmins, 2011).
In the article, Ailshire and Crimmins (2011) use secondary data analysis as the research design. To this end, the researchers analyzed data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is a survey administered to 8,568 respondents in 2006 and 7500 respondents in 2008.
Descriptive statistics was used in the examination of variations in sociodemographic characteristics among the age groups of interest (70-79 years and 90-104 years) (Ailshire & Crimmins, 2011). Wald chi-square and t-test were the statistical tests used to test differences between the groups (Ailshire & Crimmins, 2011). Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression analysis was used to explore the extent to which health status, social relationships, and psychosocial factors explained the differences in life satisfaction, perception of aging, and loneliness among the two grou...