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Access Type

WSU Access

Date of Award

January 2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Tim Bogg

Abstract

The present work replicates cross-sectional menopause literature identifying correlations among personality traits, attitudes, coping, and postmenopausal health and wellbeing. Using a subsample of the Midlife in the United States cohort assessed across 20 years, this work highlights the prospective effects of premenopausal traits and expectancies on peri- and post-menopausal health and wellbeing in a theoretically-informed multivariate framework. The modeling resulted in inadequate estimated fit, owing to the weak and primarily insignificant effects of premenopausal variables in predicting perimenopausal perceptions of health and wellbeing. Despite this, attitudes toward menopause emerged as the sole significant direct prospective predictor of postmenopausal self-rated health. Exploratory Bayesian estimation of the model found the direct effect of premenopausal attitudes on postmenopausal self-rated health to be reliable. Premenopausal conscientiousness and functional wellbeing (via the IADL) emerged as significant indirect prospective predictors of postmenopausal self-rated health via perimenopausal health. When controlling for its association with other baseline constructs, age was a significant indirect prospective predictor of postmenopausal subjective wellbeing via perimenopausal wellbeing. The discussion highlights similarities and unique characteristics of the present findings in comparison to extant literature, measurement and analytic limitations, and the contribution of this work in the identification of worry about developmental changes as a key predictor of quality of life across this transitional stage.

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