Rural landowners depend on access roads to move livestock and farm equipment. (Photo: Jesse Abrams)

Beautiful landscapes may inspire us, but it takes more than scenery to create community vitality. Wallowa County and rural communities across the country struggle with economic development, a future for their youth and the cultural tensions that arise from changing land ownership. For more than a decade, such issues in Wallowa have been addressed by Wallowa Resources, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit natural resources organizations.

“Wallowa Resources shows us what is possible. There are few places you can go in the country to get this range of innovative thinking about rural communities,” says Oregon State University forestry professor John Bliss.

So it was natural for Bliss and Associate Professor Kate MacTavish in Human Development and Family Sciences to partner with Nils Christoffersen, Wallowa Resources executive director, in the creation of an experiential learning course for OSU graduate students. Since 2005, students have spent 10 September days living with families and meeting with community leaders from Garibaldi on to the coast, to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon, to Wallowa County in the northeast corner of the state.

For students, the experience has been unforgettable. Caitlin Bell, who participated in 2008, had this to say on her final exam: “I was faced repeatedly with the formidable and humbling task of dismantling my assumptions and preconceptions and rebuilding knowledge from scratch. I learned, among many things, that rural residents are innovative, entrepreneurial, and warmly hospitable people who value community, simple living, and hard work.” Wallowa Resources reprinted her remarks in a 2009 newsletter.

The Communities and Natural Resources course has spawned student projects that arm local decision-makers with useful information about trends in education, land use, forests and other topics, adds Christoffersen. For example, two students working with MacTavish – Devora Shamah and Brooke Dolenc – surveyed Wallowa County high school students and graduates to find out what drives their aspirations. They discovered that while about a third of high school students wanted to live in Wallowa County as adults, about one quarter of graduates were actually doing so. Dolenc’s and Shamah’s reports are available online in the OSU Scholar’s Archive.

OSU’s relationship with Wallowa County is just one example of the close partnerships between the university and rural communities through Extension and agricultural experiment stations. In addition, the OSU Rural Studies Program has established formal agreements to do research in Wallowa and Tillamook counties and has been active in Lake, Coos and other counties as well.

A signature effort has been the development of “community indicators” of vitality. OSU students and faculty have collaborated with local citizens to identify markers that allow leaders to prioritize goals and evaluate progress in reaching them. Wallowa County was the focus of a recent effort led by Lena Etuk, a social demographer with OSU Extension and the College of Health and Human Sciences. With funding from the Ford Institute for Community Building, she worked with Wallowa Resources and a team of volunteers to outline 26 indicators of vitality in social, economic and environmental health and community capacity.

Reports for Oregon counties, including Tillamook and Wallowa, are available online here.

Related story: The Mythbuster

To support OSU Extension or the Rural Studies Program, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

Carolyn Aldwin's research reveals the power that stems from successfully coping with stress. (Illustration: Santiago Uceda)

Carolyn Aldwin has been privy to countless untold secrets, heartbreaking stories from war zones, hospital wards and prisoner-of-war camps. People from all walks of life have confided their everyday problems and their worst nightmares to her.

“I talked to someone who was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials,” she says. “I’ve talked to people who’ve committed murder. I’ve talked to people who’ve lost children to cancer. I’m very humbled by the things people tell me.”

Aldwin, a professor in OSU’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, has interviewed thousands of people across the United States, many of them combat veterans, for longitudinal studies of aging. Her findings have shaken up conventional notions about stress and trauma across the lifespan.

“When I was in grad school in the ‘70s, old people were viewed as frail, lonely, depressed and beset by overwhelming stresses and losses,” says Aldwin. “We’ve since learned that stress is fairly constant across the lifespan — that no stage is necessarily more or less stressful than another. What does change as we age is the way we view our troubles and the way we deal with them.”

Events as horrifying as 9/11 or as threatening as today’s tottering economy take on new perspective when seen through eyes that witnessed the Battle of the Bulge or the Great Depression. Aldwin continues to explore coping strategies through her research and to share what she learns with students. She currently teaches a University Honors College class, Coping with Stress.

Double Puzzle

At Leisure World, Carolyn Aldwin stuck out like a sore thumb. The blond, blue-jeaned 29-year-old researcher, crashing temporarily at her uncle’s townhouse, was easy to spot among the silver-haired retirees.

But this newly minted Ph.D. in the field of aging and adult development was thrilled. For her, the sprawling retirement community in Irvine, California, was a big metaphorical petri dish. Eager to discover how elders cope with life’s stressors, the young social scientist spent the next few months talking with her neighbors (average age: 78) about their struggles and worries. Scientists were just beginning to study stress-related health risks, both physical (high blood pressure, immune system suppression, heart disease) and mental (anxiety, depression). The impact of coping strategies on health and well-being was mainly theoretical at that point.

Certain puzzling patterns popped up early on. First, despite their seeming vulnerability to loss and illness, elders tend to report less stress in their lives. “If late life is supposed to be such a miserable time, why are old people reporting fewer stressors than younger people?” Aldwin wondered. This is Paradox One.

Second, most adults find positive aspects — the proverbial silver lining — in even the most wrenching events. This is Paradox Two.

“As a developmental psychologist, I believe events are connected, rather than being discrete, isolated episodes,” Aldwin says. “I wanted to investigate the ways people draw upon earlier experiences, even traumatic ones, when coping with current problems or crises.”

Teasing out the truths behind these two paradoxes has been Aldwin’s driving motivation in the decades since Leisure World. How, she wanted to know, did a soldier whose buddies perished on the battlefield convert that searing trauma into psychosocial strength over time? How could watching one’s child die of cancer mitigate the ill effects of daily stress down the road?

Ask the Right Questions

Aldwin turned up one crucial clue to the first paradox in her Leisure World study. Researchers, she discovered, were asking the wrong questions. The standard survey instrument for major life events was loaded with younger people’s milestones and struggles — marriage, parenting, military service, divorce, unemployment, incarceration. By broadening the questioning, Aldwin found that elders face not fewer stressors, just different ones. It turns out that as people age, they fret less about themselves and more about loved ones. These indirect stressors — a grown child’s job loss, a spouse’s move to a nursing home, a sibling’s struggle with Alzheimer’s — Aldwin calls “network” stressors.

She designed a new survey instrument, the Elders Life Stress Inventory, to account for them.

The new survey, however, failed to resolve the paradox. Instead, the question mark shifted from the amount of stress to the response to stress. With the new instrument, older subjects were reporting life stressors roughly equal in number to those of younger subjects. Yet still they claimed fewer worries. When prodded — “Certainly, you must have some problems”— one man parsed the wording for Aldwin. “I don’t have problems,” the octogenarian told her. “I have concerns.” The biggest of these concerns was his 90-year-old sister suffering from dementia and living alone in New York City. She refused to move, despite his entreaties. So he settled into a philosophical stance (“There’s nothing more I can do”), thereby keeping his emotional equilibrium.

This ability to stave off stress derives from what Aldwin calls “perspective.” Having survived the slings and arrows of life for 60, 70, 80 years, elders often are able to step back and assess new challenges with a steadier gaze. As one man told her, “Once you’ve watched your 20-year-old daughter die of cancer, it’s hard to get really upset about other things.”

Silver Linings

Aldwin and her adviser at the University of California, Irvine, Dan Stokols, both should have grown up to be drug-using dropouts — that is, if you believed the psychological research literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Each had lost a parent in childhood, and delinquency was the expected outcome for kids so bereft. Sitting together in Stokols’ office one autumn afternoon, these two highly accomplished PhDs wondered aloud how they had defied expert predictions. Maybe, they speculated, those predictions were off-base. After all, it was known that geniuses often had older parents who died. Other emerging evidence suggested that remarkable resilience was not only possible, but actually common, in the wake of tragedy. Their curiosity evolved into a research thread.

“We started asking, ‘Are there circumstances under which stress can have positive effects?’” she recalls. “This was a very radical notion at the time.”

No formal, quantitative studies existed then. But the trauma literature from records of tragic events turned up promising leads for further research. In tragedy’s aftermath, many victims reported closer community ties, increased mastery and heightened altruism. The extraordinary lives of many Holocaust survivors, such as Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Daniel Kahneman, also seemed to refute the view of trauma as inevitably and irretrievably damaging to the psyche.

To explore this intriguing phenomenon, Aldwin added one question to the 1,000-subject Normative Aging Study then under way in Boston: Was there anything in your earlier life that was useful in helping you deal with a current problem? She was stunned by the response — not so much because 80 percent of the respondents said yes, but because they identified serious, even horrific, occurrences as teachable moments. Battlefield traumas came up often for this population of men, who were mostly veterans of the Korean and Second World wars.

“One guy said, ‘I was shot down at Midway in the Pacific,’” Aldwin recalls. “‘I spent three days bobbing in a lifeboat while the battled raged around me. I thought, if I can survive this, I can survive anything.’” Midway became the yardstick against which he measured every tough spot he faced in later years.

Another veteran said he watched three commanders die on the European frontlines. Being next in rank, he was promoted on the battlefield. He managed to lead his men to safety. Ever after, he gauged life’s challenges against that life-or-death test of his mettle.

Over and over, Aldwin heard this story. Even the fiercest conflict in a boardroom or a courtroom is manageable after you’ve faced down death on the battlefield, the old soldiers said. Psychologists call the phenomenon post-traumatic growth or stress-related growth. “This is not to suggest that combat is good — not at all,” says Aldwin, who has taken flak from colleagues for suggesting that anything positive could come out of the horrors of war. “Trauma has long-term effects. But the guys who were able to find benefits in their military service — whether it was unit cohesion or believing in the mission — were much less likely to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Aldwin found similar results in another Boston study, the Health and Personality Style Survey. A majority of subjects, 70 percent, reported that trauma led to positive outcomes including closer family ties, better coping skills, more positive values and deeper spirituality.

Observes Aldwin: “Older people understand that problems are finite, that grief is time-limited. They also know that letting yourself get upset when you have a chronic illness like hypertension can trigger a cascade of harmful physiological responses.”

To support the OSU College of Health and Human Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

“A 30-year-old single mother from Iowa laughed when asked whether she considered herself an adult: ‘I don’t know if I’m an adult yet. I still don’t feel quite grown up. Being an adult kind of sounds like having things, everything is kind of in a routine and on track, and I don’t feel like I’m quite on track.’”
— Furstenberg Jr., F. F., S. Kennedy, V. C. McLoyd, R. G. Rumbaut, & R. Settersten. 2004. Growing up is harder to do. Contexts, 3(3), 33-41.

It takes longer to become an adult today, and that passage is more complicated than in the past. Our MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy is focused on understanding the above passage.

In the eyes of the law and society, young people cross the threshold of adulthood at ages 18 or 21. But as our recent book On the Frontier of Adulthood (University of Chicago Press, 2005) reveals, few 21-year-olds today would actually be considered “adult” based on traditional markers such as leaving home, finishing school, starting a job, getting married and having children.

A lengthy period before adulthood, often spanning the 20s and even extending into the 30s, is now devoted to further education, job searching and exploration, experience in romantic relationships and personal development.

But we should not take these changes to mean that the early adult years are now an extended “moratorium” characterized by pervasive experimentation and the avoidance of commitments.

To be sure, a subset of young adults falls into this category. But most of the young people in our studies are seeking responsibility, negotiating autonomy, making commitments, nurturing relationships and finding ways to contribute to their communities. Yet many are having a difficult time finding their way, and it is taking them much longer to get there.

The new terrain of early adulthood carries tremendous social and cultural significance. For many young adults, navigating this transition phase is often possible only with significant family support. Accordingly, sizeable child-rearing costs now occur between the ages of 18 and 34, and they have increased dramatically in the last 30 years. While middle-class families make substantial investments in their children through their 30s, the fate of young people who come from struggling or fragmented families is therefore of great concern.

We must especially be concerned about the fate of young people who have been in the foster care, special education or juvenile justice systems and are abruptly cut off from state support when they hit age 18 or 21. These young people are without any safety nets whatsoever. Our network closely examined the struggles of these and other vulnerable populations in the subsequent book, On Your Own Without a Net (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Our work is now focused on how social institutions and policies might be redesigned to more appropriately meet the needs of young people, and how the capacities of young people themselves might be strengthened so that they are better equipped to make their way.

“As individuals age, they become increasingly like themselves.”
Bernice Neugarten,
1964 (founder of the field of personality and aging)

In 2006, the first wave of baby boomers turned 60. Even for the bold cultural warriors of the 1960s — the rockers, idealists, protesters and iconoclasts who transformed the nation — the transition to retirement is likely to be tough, according to OSU researcher Karen Hooker. Whether they thrive or struggle as they redefine their roles and restructure their time, she says, will depend largely on their personality.

The role of personality in life’s trajectory has intrigued Hooker ever since her undergraduate days at Denison University in Ohio. Why, she wondered, do some people move through adulthood with relative ease, rolling with the punches, keeping a sense of purpose and hope, while others succumb to depression, addiction or hopelessness? Then, as a graduate student in developmental psychology at the College of William and Mary, the nascent field of aging captured her.

“The whole notion that development doesn’t stop when you hit 21 was really just emerging,” says the professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, reminiscing in her Milam Hall office. “It wasn’t on the general public’s radar screen, in spite of the demographics of a growing aging population. I thought, ‘Wow! This is really untapped.’”

That was the late 1970s, a time when old people were getting a bum rap in popular culture. “Everywhere you looked, there was a lot of ageism,” she recalls. “If you watched TV, you didn’t see very many models of old people, and the ones you did see were extremely negative.”

The stereotypes of crotchety, decrepit, frumpy or demented elders didn’t jibe with Hooker’s own experience. Her grandmother and great-grandfather both maintained optimism, good humor, curiosity, energy and intellect throughout their lives. She remembers watching her great-grandfather working on his Pennsylvania farm and her grandmother playing bridge with friends, well into their ‘90s. “They were vibrant and interesting and resilient,” she says. “They were living history.”

So the scholar-athlete from the Midwest (who once dreamed of becoming a gym teacher) went on to earn her Ph.D. at Penn State, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University’s Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. Over the next quarter-century — with funding from agencies such as the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Mental Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — she has delved deeply into the mysteries of personality and aging. The issues she explores with surveys, interviews, statistical analyses, and theoretical models are some of the most wrenching and life-altering in human experience — bereavement, institutionalization for dementia, mental health of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease caregivers, memory loss, becoming a parent, retiring from the workforce. “The thread underlying all my work is transitions — those times during the course of life when personality may act as a compass for navigating new circumstances,” she says.

Ironically, her decades absorbed in aging have barely registered on Hooker’s face. The lithe 50-year-old can be seen most evenings swimming laps in the campus pool or running the hills of Corvallis — the very kinds of lifestyle choices whose benefits are well-documented in the literature. Researchers know with certainty that working out, eating and drinking in moderation, and eschewing tobacco and other risky behaviors support healthy aging. They are clear about the effects of education, affluence, and ethnicity. They know, too, that engagement with life and strong social support networks are vital. Less understood, however, is how our personalities interact with these myriad factors to influence our mental and physical health over the years.

To broaden and deepen the concept of personality, Hooker has developed a theoretical model called “the six foci of personality” with Dan McAdams of Northwestern University. Published in the prestigious Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences in 2003, the model has been adopted by universities across the U.S. as a powerful tool to guide future studies in personality and aging. That’s because it weaves the various strands of personality into a whole fabric, including the life stories we construct and the narratives we tell. This new unity of personality as a multidimensional concept opens the way to more comprehensive explorations of the aging self.

“The framework lets researchers better address the full richness of personality,” Hooker says. “It helps to solidify the science of personality in adulthood through a common language that had previously been elusive.”

Hooker’s current investigations into our “possible selves” are also yielding tantalizing clues. Self-concepts about the ideal we hope to be or the person we fear to become play critical roles as internal motivators, she explains, acting as psychological carrots and sticks in decision-making. By the time we reach old age, she has found, most of us have at least one health-related possible self. If you carry around a mental image of yourself as, for example, a 75-year-old equestrian cantering across the landscape, or an 80-year-old bicyclist pedaling Cycle Oregon, you’re better able to cope with — and fend off — that scary possible self, the bedridden nursing-home resident, Hooker says.

“Personality is the driving force behind successful aging,” she asserts. “What type of person you are, how reliably you can be counted on, your approach to people — all are crucial for understanding social support, coping strategies, stress and other health-related behaviors.”

When she uses the term “personality,” Hooker isn’t talking only about the traits we characterize with adjectives such as bubbly, aloof, shy or gregarious. Those outward qualities are just one side of personality. The other side is about actions — setting and achieving goals, for instance. Hooker’s ongoing research and scholarship in developmental psychology is revealing how those two aspects of personality — traits (“structures”) and states (“processes”) — affect social and emotional adjustment in later life. Although traits are more-or-less fixed, states are dynamic. In other words, they can change. That means that useful skills for coping with retirement — such as how to structure leisure time to make it both meaningful and manageable — are teachable and learnable.

“People tend to think of personality as immutable, carved in stone,” she says. “But we are finding that in fact, it’s a domain where there’s potential for growth, even in the very last days of life. You can always grow in some aspect of yourself.”