Langer and Rodin (1976) Aims

Langer and Rodin (1976) Aims Langer and Rodin aimed to investigate the effect of personal control on general well-being and engagement in activities in elderly people in a nursing home. In the context of this study, personal control related to how much choice and how much responsibility the residents had in their daily lives. A further aim of the study was to extend the findings of previous research by including a larger number of measures to assess the effects of increased control. Context The impact of personal control on physical and psychological wellbeing has been an issue that has greatly influenced research in health psychology. An early study was conducted by Seligman and Maier in 1967 in which dogs were initially exposed to either escapable or inescapable electric shocks. They were then placed in chambers with a jumpable barrier and a shock delivered to their feet. The dogs who had previously received an escapable shock jumped over the barrier to avoid the shock. In contrast, despite the jumpable barrier, the dogs who had previously received an inescapable shock lay down and whined and made no attempt to escape. The researchers concluded that the lack of control in the first part of the study caused the dogs to become helpless in the face of the second shock. Such research can be applied to humans because it suggests that an inability to escape from difficult circumstances reduces our sense of control thus leading to feelings of helplessness and depression. Another study by Corah and Boffa in 1970 investigated whether control can help to reduce stress. In one condition participants were exposed to expected loud noise (predictable stressor), whereas in another condition participants were exposed to loud noise that they were not warned about (unpredictable stressor). This manipulation showed that the predictable stressor induced lower levels of stress in participants than the unpredictable stressor. Corah and Boffa argued that predictability leads to the perception of more control over the noise thus reducing the potentially harmful effects of stress. The implication of this study, therefore, is that people who feel they have more control over their environment will feel less stressed. The concept of control was further investigated by Langer et al. (1975) using patients waiting for surgery. An experimental group was asked to think positively about the surgery, e.g., they were asked to think of the benefits it would bring, whereas a control group was given no briefing beforehand. Measures of anxiety levels showed that the experimental group experienced less anxiety than the control group. In other words, positive thinking helped patients increase the control they had over their surgery and they therefore experienced less stress. Research of this type led Langer to speculate whether increased control would also lead to enhanced health and well-being in nursing home residents. Procedure The study was conducted in an American nursing home. In a field experiment with an independent groups design the researchers manipulated how much personal choice and

enhanced responsibility residents in the nursing home were given. The degree of choice and responsibility was therefore the independent variable (IV). The IV had two conditions: one group of residents was assigned to the control condition in which the nursing home staff s responsibility to them was emphasised and another group of residents was assigned to the experimental condition in which responsibility for themselves was emphasised. The design was unusual, however, because individual residents were not randomly allocated to conditions. Instead, two floors in the home were chosen and each floor was then assigned to the conditions randomly. This procedure was chosen because residents on each of the floors rarely socialised with each other hence there was less risk of residents talking with each other about anything related to the study. The residents from the two floors were aged between 65 and 90 years old (47 residents in the experimental condition, 44 in the control condition). The study began with two meetings where a member of staff gave a speech. The residents in the control condition listened to a speech that emphasised that residents needs were the responsibility of the nursing home staff, whereas for the residents the experimental group, the speech stressed that residents had responsibility in their lives. This responsibility took the form of telling residents that they had a choice in picking a day of the week for a film night at the home and giving them a chance to choose a plant and take care of it. The control group was not given any of these choices. The dependent variables in this study took various forms. First of all, there were a number of behavioural measures to assess how involved the residents were in the daily life of the home. One behavioural measure assessed how active the residents were. This was achieved by sticking white tape to the wheels of the wheelchairs used by the residents ten days after the study had started. A day later the tape was removed and the amount of discolouration used to assess degree of activity. In addition, involvement in the film night was assessed by recording the degree of attendance. The second set of dependent variables related to a questionnaire given to residents a week before the speeches (time point 1) and three weeks afterwards (time point 2). A female research assistant who was unaware of the purpose of the study administered the questionnaire. The residents were required to rate themselves in terms of how much control they felt they had, and how happy and active they felt. The assistant then rated the residents for alertness. Further dependent variables were obtained from a questionnaire given to staff at both time points. In this questionnaire the staff rated residents in terms of sociability and stated how much time per week residents spent taking part in activities. Findings The analysis of the behavioural measures showed that film attendance was significantly greater in the experimental compared to the control group. However, the analysis of tape discolouration showed no significant differences between the groups. The analysis of the questionnaire that residents completed revealed a number of differences between the groups. With regard to activity levels, the experimental group had become significantly more active between time point 1 and 2 than the control group. As well as this, there was a significantly greater increase in happiness in the experimental group compared to the control group between the two time points. In contrast, when the

residents had to assess how much control they felt they had in their lives, there was no difference between the experimental and control groups. This result could have been misleading, however, because over a fifth of residents did not fully understand what was meant by control. The analysis of the alertness ratings taken by the research assistant revealed that between time points 1 and 2 there was a significantly greater increase for the experimental group compared to the control group. However, the analysis of residents self report data and the assistant s ratings of alertness could not conducted using data from all the participants because only 25 residents from the experimental group and 20 from the control group were available at the time of the meeting with the research assistant. Analysis of the questionnaires given to staff again revealed differences between the groups. The nurses ratings showed significantly greater increases in the experimental group for sociability and activity between the time points compared to the control group. Conclusions The major conclusion for this study is that even a small amount of additional control of one s environment can have a significant impact on elderly people s well-being and their degree of engagement in everyday activities. Furthermore, additional control can produce a higher degree of general alertness in elderly people. Langer and Rodin state that these results have important implications for care policies in nursing homes for the elderly. They suggest that care plans for elderly people need to build in strategies that emphasise autonomy, i.e., control. In this way, negative consequences of aging in older people like decreased alertness, activity, and sociability, could potentially be reduced or even reversed. Evaluation The research by Langer and Rodin can be evaluated in terms of its methodology. First of all, their study is low in population validity because it used American elderly residents in one nursing home. The use of a restricted population therefore inhibits generalisation of the findings to other groups of people. For example, would the same results have been obtained using residents in different American nursing homes? Also, would similar findings have been obtained in a European nursing home? Generalisation of Langer and Rodin s findings to different age groups is also restricted because their study focused on elderly people. This means that applying their findings to the behaviour of children, for example, would be problematic. Another methodological criticism relates to the number of original participants included in the study s analyses. At the start of the research, there were 47 residents in the experimental condition and 44 in the control condition. However, a large percentage of the sample could not be included in some of the final analyses because they were not available when the research assistant was at the home: in the analysis of residents self report data and the assistant s ratings of alertness, 47% of the experimental group and 55% of the control group were not included. Losing participants in a research project is known as attrition. Attrition is problematic in research because it means that potentially valuable data is lost. How far this would have affected the results of Langer and Rodin s study is extremely difficult to say but we can speculate that the loss of participants through attrition would have had some effect on the analyses.

For this study we need to consider possible ethical issues that were generated by the research. Perhaps the issue of most concern is the fact that the residents were not told that they were taking part in a study. As a result, the residents were not able to give informed consent and consequently did not have the option to withdraw from the research. Nevertheless, the deception strengthened the study in that the procedure helped to avoid problems such as participants guessing the aim of the study and not behaving naturally. The dependent variables used in Langer and Rodin s study can be criticised because they were subjective measures. These types of measure require participants to make judgements about their own or other people s behaviour using psychological measuring tools like questionnaires and interviews. Consequently, there is the potential for biased results. One form of bias is social desirability bias whereby participants do not give truthful answers because they want to present themselves in a favourable light to the researcher. Obviously, the residents in Langer and Rodin s investigation did not know they were taking part in a study but they could have tried to impress the female research assistant. The interpretation of the wheelchair tape was also subjective because the researchers would have needed to make their own judgements about the degree of discoloration on the tape. This too could have introduced bias into the analyses. What we can say, therefore, is that the impact of possibly biased answers on the findings needs to be considered. Related studies A related study is one carried out by Rodin and Langer in 1977. This was carried out 18 months after the first study and was designed to assess the continuing impact of the different treatment conditions on the residents. One of the results of this second study was that the residents in the experimental condition (more responsibility and choice) were still generally happier and more active and alert than the residents in the control condition. What was most surprising, however, was that the general health of the residents in the experimental condition was rated as better than those in the control condition by the nursing home staff. In addition, 30% of the residents in the control condition had died but only 15% of the residents in the experimental condition had died. This indicates that not only can increased control improve general activity and feelings of well-being, it could also be critical in enhancing life expectancy. Research into the effects of low control on well-being was extended by a study into aircraft noise by Evans, Hygge and Bullinger (1995). The study focused on the impact of chronic aircraft noise on children living near an airport in Germany. A control group of children who lived in a quiet neighbourhood was used as a comparison. One of the measures in this investigation was an assessment of the children s motivation. In this task the participants were required initially to read a piece of text while there was loud noise in the background. The participants were then given puzzles to solve. The first puzzle had no solution, whereas the second puzzle could be solved. The researchers measured how many attempts the participants made to solve the first puzzle before giving up and moving on to the second. Compared to the control group, the children living near the airport gave up sooner on the first puzzle. It is likely that these children felt that noise is uncontrollable (as a result of their living circumstances) and were more likely as a result to feel less motivated due to this lack

of control. Again, this research provides evidence for the notion that a lack of control can affect motivation, a critical factor in general well-being. Further research into how control affects health and well-being was carried out by Marmot, Bosma, Hemingway, Brunner and Stansfeld (1997). However, instead of investigating elderly nursing home residents or children, this study focused on British civil servants working in 20 civil service departments across London. The participants in this investigation were assessed for any health changes specific to the cardiovascular system. For example, they were assessed for any episodes of angina and suspected/actual heart attacks. They were also categorised in terms of their employment grades in the civil service. The assumption was that workers on the lowest grades would have the least degree of control over their working conditions, whereas those on the highest grades would have the greatest degree of control. The major finding in this research was that workers on the lowest grades, i.e., with least control, were more vulnerable to heart problems. This study therefore extends Langer and Rodin s findings by emphasising that control is an important factor in our well-being and health. Langer, E., & Rodin, J., (1976) The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 191-198.