Awareness of age-related change in very different cultural-political contexts: A cross-cultural examination of aging in Burkina Faso and Germany

Anton Schönstein; Anna Schlomann; Hans-Werner Wahl; Till Bärnighausen

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.928564

Awareness of age-related change in very different cultural-political contexts: A cross-cultural examination of aging in Burkina Faso and Germany

Front Psychiatry. 2023 Jan 20:13:928564. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.928564. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Anton Schönstein^{1

2}, Anna Schlomann^{1

3}, Hans-Werner Wahl^{1

4}, Till Bärnighausen⁵

Affiliations

¹ Network Aging Research, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
² Department of Psychology, Mannheim University, Mannheim, Germany.
³ Institute for Educational Sciences, Heidelberg University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany.
⁴ Institute of Psychology, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
⁵ Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.

Abstract

Combining recent developments in research on personal views on aging (VoA) and a cross-country comparative approach, this study examined awareness of age-related change (AARC) in samples from rural Burkina Faso and Germany. The aims of this study were (1) to examine for an assumed proportional shift in the relationship between gains/losses toward more losses as predicted by life span psychology; (2) to estimate the association between AARC dimensions and subjective age; and (3) to examine the association between health variables and AARC. A cross-sectional method involving a large, representative sample from rural Burkina Faso that included participants aged 40 and older (N = 3,028) and a smaller convenience sample of German respondents aged 50 years and older (N = 541) were used to address these questions. A proportional shift toward more AARC-losses was more clearly observable in the sample from Burkina Faso as compared to the German reference. In both samples, subjective age was consistently more strongly related to AARC-losses than to AARC-gains. Within the sample from Burkina Faso, differential associations of AARC-gains and AARC-losses to health variables could be shown. In conclusion, the findings support key tenets of life span psychology including that age-related gains occur even late in life and that a shift toward more losses occurs with increasing age. Also, feeling subjectively younger may indeed be more strongly guided by lowered negative aging experiences than by increased positive ones.

Keywords: AARC; health; life span development; subjective age; views on aging.

Grants and funding

The Aging in Nouna, Burkina Faso study was supported by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship dedicated to TB, Heidelberg University. The data collection for the German study was made possible by funding from the Carl Zeiss Foundation (Project P2017-01-002; HEIAGE, Heidelberg University, Germany) and a Humboldt Research Award to Manfred Diehl and H-WW based on their Transcoop funding scheme. For the publication fee we acknowledge financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft within the funding programme-Open Access Publikationskosten as well as by Heidelberg University.