This program is issued to encourage innovative, hypothesis-driven R01 research grant applications that can expand understanding of the role and impact of families and interpersonal relationships on health and well-being in midlife and older age. The program encourages research that evaluates rigorous, quantifiable predictive models for estimating the causal pathways by which family process and structure and intimate relationships might mediate or moderate well-documented social determinants of health, above and beyond other established risk or protective health factors, and that can increase knowledge of the independent and unique contributions of family and intimate relationship variables to healthy aging. Following from the above,the program seeks to support research into both the origins and the amelioration of family and intimate relationship factors that have adverse consequences for health, as well as the origins and promotion of factors that have protective or beneficial health consequences. To these ends, the program encourages research that takes a life span perspective, including studies which focus on early life influences on later life outcomes and on processes in midlife that impact subsequent trajectories of health and function. NIA is particularly interested in research that can inform the design of interventions that target the maintenance and improvement of aging-relevant outcomes for the following: satisfying, high quality intimate relationships, compliance and adherence to healthy behaviors; adaptive caregiving relationships, shared decision-making, and economic security.
The scope of this program covers research on families; systems of two or more interconnected and interdependent individuals, including multigenerational families; subsystems of families, including parent-child/grandchild, siblings, and marital and intimate partnerships; and long-term close friendships. Both individual-level and population-level approaches are welcomed. Cross cultural and cross-national comparative analyses, including those that include samples from non-industrialized societies are encouraged. The program encourages secondary data analysis using publicly available cross-national panel data (see Publicly Available Databases for Aging-Related Secondary Analyses in the Behavioral and Social Sciences ), such as the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), National Long-Term Care Survey (NLCTS), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), and Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). To facilitate cross-national comparative studies on aging, the NIA sponsors The Global Aging Data Repository , an online resource of internationally comparable survey data on aging around the world (including a digital library of survey questions, a search engine for finding comparable questions across surveys, and identically defined variables for cross-country analysis).