PROACTIVE COPING IN COMMUNITY-DWELLING OLDER AUSTRALIANS

This article reports on a study of older community-dwelling Australian adults which aimed to test whether a relatively unexplored construct, proactive coping, could have a role in purpose in life, personal growth, and life satisfaction. A total of 109 women and 115 men (Mean age = 75.04 yrs, SD = 6.66) completed a questionnaire containing Greenglass et al.’s (1999) Proactive Coping Inventory, the Purpose in Life and Personal Growth sub-scales of Ryff’s (1989) Psychological Well-being Scales, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985). The results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that proactive coping was a highly significant predictor of all three measures of well-being, after controlling for age and health. The effect on personal growth and purpose in life was particularly strong. Proactive coping does seem to be an important variable in the psycho-logical well-being of older adults. However, the correlational nature of the design, and the likelihood of some conceptual overlap between the well-being variables, suggest that these inferences can only be tentative. Designing psychological interventions to improve proactive coping may help to improve quality of life at older ages. There is a need for experimental research to further explore the causal influence of proactive coping and for further theoretical work to determine the exact nature of proactive coping