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. 2024 Jan;60(1):75-93.
doi: 10.1037/dev0001633. Epub 2023 Sep 28.

Purposeful and purposeless aging: Structural issues for sense of purpose and their implications for predicting life outcomes

Gabrielle N Pfund  1 , Gabriel Olaru  2 , Mathias Allemand  3 , Patrick L Hill  4
Affiliations

Purposeful and purposeless aging: Structural issues for sense of purpose and their implications for predicting life outcomes

Gabrielle N Pfund et al. Dev Psychol. 2024 Jan.

Abstract

Despite the value of sense of purpose during older adulthood, this construct often declines with age. With some older adults reconsidering the relevance of purpose later in life, the measurement of purpose may suffer from variance issues with age. The current study investigated whether sense of purpose functions similarly across ages and evaluated if the predictive power of purpose on mental, physical, cognitive, and financial outcomes changes when accounting for a less age-affected measurement structure. Utilizing data from two nationwide panel studies (Health and Retirement Study: n = 14,481; Midlife in the United States: n = 4,030), the current study conducted local structural equation modeling and found two factors for the positively and negatively valenced purpose items in the Purpose in Life subscale (Ryff, 1989), deemed the purposeful and purposeless factor. These factors become less associated with each other at higher ages. When reproducing past findings with this two-factor structure, the current study found that the purposeful and purposeless factors predicted these outcomes in the same direction as would be suggested by past research, but the magnitude of these effects differed for some outcomes. The discussion focuses on the implications of what this means for our understanding of sense of purpose across the lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflict of interests to report. We used freely available panel data for this study, which can be accessed via (MIDUS: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/203) and (HRS: https://hrs.isr.umich.edu/data-products) panel sites. All analyses scripts are available in an OSF repository (https://osf.io/rh2df/).

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Bifactor Model Used for Prediction.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Factor Loadings, Item Intercepts and Residuals Across Age Note. Presented are the model parameters for the two-factor model estimated with local structural equation modeling across age. To estimate the parameters of interest freely (i.e., to not constrain the first factor loading to 1), factors variances and means were constrained to 1 and 0, respectively. Numbers indicate the original item number.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Model Fit Statistics and Factor Correlations Across Age for Both Samples. Note. The longer lines represent estimates in the MIDUS sample, the shorter lines in the HRS sample. Vertical lines for the correlations represent the 95% confidence interval
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Sense of Purpose Composite, Purposeful Factor, and Purposeless Factor for Financial, Cognitive, Health, and Well-Being Predictions at Wave 1 and Wave 2 Controlling for Retirement Status, Marital Status, Age, and Sex for MIDUS Sample.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Sense of Purpose Composite, Purposeful Factor, and Purposeless Factor for Financial, Cognitive, Health, and Well-Being Predictions at Wave 1 and Wave 2 Controlling for Retirement Status, Marital Status, Age, and Sex for HRS Sample.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Comparison of Prediction of Financial, Cognitive Functioning, Subjective Health, and Well-Being Outcomes for Purpose in Life General and Method Factor in the MIDUS Sample.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Comparison of Prediction of Financial, Cognitive Functioning, Subjective Health, and Well-Being Outcomes for Purpose in Life General and Method Factor in the HRS Sample.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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