Question

Describe Continuity Theory. Provide an example. Describe Competence and Environmental Press. Provide an example. What strategies do you recommend for older adults to use to preserve or extend their intellectual stamina? Describe how ethnic and cultural factors influence behavior in late life. Describe your thoughts on retirement. Describe your position on age as a determining factor for retirement. Describe what factors you think should be used to determine retirement.

Answer 1

• Continuity theory proposes that people use familiar strategies to cope with daily life.
• Too little continuity promotes a feeling that life is too unpredictable.
• Too much continuity promotes boredom.
• Optimal continuity allows for challenges and interest without overwhelming.
• The continuity theory, suggests that, most aging adults tend to maintain their activities, behavior, personality, and relationships as they did during their earlier years. The basic premise that, as an adult ages and becomes a senior citizen in society, he/she tends to maintain their unique mentality, behavior, and physical and social activities, as they did in the past when they were younger.
• The theory also deals with the internal and external nature of continuity with respect to aging. It claims that along with the social continuity of activities, behavior, and relationships, internal continuity of ideas, experiences, skills, etc., and external continuity of activities, social roles, relationships, lifestyle, etc., are maintained. These maintained aspects are utilized by senior citizens in order to adapt to the new and changing environment, and eventually adopt it.
• For example:A young extrovert will tend to remain extroverted in his/her later years, causing them to continue being social and outgoing.
• An introverted and withdrawn person, similarly, will most likely be a private person in his/her old age as well.
• Similarly, other traits such as physically active, avid reader, dancing, singing, etc., will also be maintained in individuals, despite their progressing age.
• Competence is the upper limit of a person’s ability to function in physical health, sensory-perceptual skills, motor skills, cognitive skills, and ego strength.
  
• Environmental press is the physical, interpersonal, or social demands of the environment.
• The fit between a person's level of competencies and the demands from their environment affect how well an individual is functioning.
• For example, if a woman is a wheelchair user, her competence is low so a kitchen designed for able-bodied people causes high pressure. To adapt her environment, she needs to modify her kitchen. If not, the environment leads her to maladaptation and the kitchen environment will change her behavioral patterns such as eating habits.
  
• For older adults to preserve or extend their intellectual stamina, they need to eat healthy and keep doing physical exercises that keeps their body healthy. They should also be involved in simple studying of current affairs to keep updated on what is going around them.
• Ethnic and cultural actors influence behavior in late life through the conduct of one’s life.They determine what a person eats, drinks, thinks as well as interacts with other people. For example if a person is brought up in cultures that does not permit eating certain types, the individual will not eat such foods in the older age.
• Retirement is a time when an individual stops working for fulltime and this can occur early or late in life depending on other factors such as health (Fox, 2012). People may choose to retire if they choose to. Retirement brings a new chapter in one’s life where one can engage inpersonal priorities in life.
• If the person needs to pay debts,then they can retire only when they pay off the debts,since retirement will terminate their income.Also expenses is another factor to determine retirement,by estimating how much money one would be needing in the future to handle the daily expenses,retirement should be planned.