Contextual Influences on Well-Being Across the Life Course

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This session examines how contextual conditions shape well-being across the life course. Moving beyond individual-level explanations, the papers highlight how social, spatial, institutional, and environmental contexts structure opportunities, constraints, and inequalities from early and midlife into older adulthood. Topics include civic infrastructure and cumulative disadvantage in underserved communities, rural–urban disparities in mobility and activity spaces, gendered life course trajectories under different macro-level institutional arrangements, neighborhood social and physical environments and older adults’ perceptions of safety, and occupational exposure to extreme heat as a long-term health risk. Collectively, these papers show how well-being is shaped by the unequal distribution of resources, exposures, and protections across places and over time. The session advances understanding of aging and inequality by emphasizing the cumulative role of context and the ways structural conditions become embodied across the life course.

Sub Unit

• Aging and the Life Course Section / Aging and the Life Course Section Open Paper Call

Presider

• Leping Wang, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Neighborhood Social and Physical Conditions Shape Older Adults’ Everyday Safety - Liang Cai, University of Chicago; Christopher R Browning, Ohio State University; Kathleen A. Cagney, University of Chicago

• Far From Home? Activity Spaces Across Rural-Urban Contexts in Later Life - Adam Roth, Oklahoma State University; Siyun Peng, Indiana University-Bloomington; Jafnun Nudrat Jarin, Pennsylvania State University; Maleah Fekete, Indiana University-Bloomington; Tianyao Qu, Indiana University-Bloomington; Brea Louise Perry, Indiana University-Bloomington

• Aging Under Infrastructural Strain: Civic Capacity and Cumulative Inequality in Later Life - Melanie Z. Plasencia, Rutgers University-Newark

• Gendered Life Course Trajectories, Gender Equality, and Health - Wesley Wang, Purdue University

• The Heat Pays Later: Long-Term Occupation-Specific Exposure to Extreme Heat and Later-Life Physical Health - Jason Wong, Yale University

Session Organizers

• Patricia A. Thomas, Purdue University

• Haowei Wang, Syracuse University