Health and Personal Styles, 1989

This study, funded by the National Institute on Aging and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, examined the role of lifestyle as a mediator of relations between multiple dimensions of sense of control and various aspects of health in order to see if individuals with stronger beliefs in internal control and/or weaker beliefs in external control would be more likely to have an overall healthy lifestyle. Lifestyle was defined as a composite score of five health practices (exercise, dietary habits, sleep, smoking habits and alcohol intake). The sample included 150 men and women recruited from membership lists of four economically diverse treatment centers operated by a health membership organization (HMO) in the greater Boston area. The HMO provided a random sample of names stratified by treatment center, age, and sex. A total of 800 letters was sent requesting participation. The goal was to obtain a quota sample of men and women from different age groups with some variation in socio-economic background. Approximately 20% of those contacted participated in the study, including 66 men and 84 women ranging in age from 25 to 85 (with a mean age of 58.5). The median salary for those participants currently working was between $30,000 and $39,000. Participation involved three components: completing a questionnaire booklet by mail, releasing medical records, and coming to the university for an hour-long interview. The questionnaires were designed to tap aspects of personality including level of ego development, extent of needs for achievement, affiliation, and power, as well as beliefs about locus of control in various life domains. Measures included in the questionnaires included the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the 50- Bipolar Self-Rating Scales, the Levenson Locus of Control Scale, Loevingers Sentence Completion, and the Life Patterns Questionnaire; the Bem Sex Role Inventory was completed by a subset of participants (n=82); the Murray Research Archive does not hold the medical records at this time. The Murray Research Archive also holds original record paper data from this study