Generativity in older age: Spanish scales of

generativity and its relationship with wellbeing

F. Villar, C. Triadó, O. López, M. Celdrán, C. Solé, S. Pinazo, J. Fabà

IFA 11TH GLOBAL CONFERENCE ON AGEING

28 May – 1 June 2012 Prage Picture from

www.legadosolidario.org

Young

Intimacy vs. isolation

Adulthood

Generativity vs. stagnation

Ageing

Integrity vs. despair

Love

Care

Wisdom

Generativity and aging

Erik Erikson

Development as a sequence of crisis

Its overcoming leads to new competence

Workforce

Civic

participation Informal

caring

Volunteering

Generative

activities

Generative concern

Personal wellbeing

Objetives

Adapt McAdams’s generative concern

and generative behavior scales into

Spanish

Study generativity in older age and its

relationship with their well-being

Method

165 participants (M= 73.55; SD = 7.07)

Instruments

Sociodemographic data

Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS) and

Generative Behaviors Checklist (GBC) (McAdams

& St Aubin 1992)

Satisfaction with Life Scale (SLS) (Diener, et al 1985)

Future Orientation (FO), from the

Shortened Ryff’s Scales (Villar, et al 2010)

Results

Objective 1

High internal consistence of the two

Generativity scales (0.89:LGS; 0.81:GBC)

High correlation between generative concern

and activities (r = 0.49; p<0.0001)

Objetive 2: Generative during Aging

More generative concern than activities (t(158) = 10.54; p < .001)

As they age, generative activities tended to shorten (r = -.21; p < .01)

Life satisfaction is only related to generative concern (r = .38; p<0.01)

Future orientation is related with both generative scales: concern (r = .27; p<0.01) and activities (r = .32; p<0.01)

Conclussions

Generativity could be a good concept

related to aging that broad other positive

concept of aging as productive or active

aging

Feeling generative concern does not

always lead to generative acts: Could have

an negative impact in the long run?

Thank you!

Montse Celdrán mceldran@ub.edu