Adult Observation Scenarios

Two notable differences between the adult that I interviewed and the expected findings that surprised me the most were that she felt no change in her muscle strength/weakening of her bones and that despite growing up in the U.S., influenced by Western culture, due to her and her husband’s Asian backgrounds, they spend a lot of time with his parents and they live with her brother-in-law instead of on their own. This surprised me because as we learned in class and through our textbook, as age increases, muscle mass and bone mass decreases, making the body weaker. When I asked her if she felt like there has been a decrease in her strength or if she felt like her bones were getting weaker, she said that she felt no change at all. I was also surprised that it is not normal in Western cultures for the parents of midlife adults to live with their children. Her in-laws live with her …show more content…
In middle adulthood, job changes happen and sometimes adults decide to quit their current jobs due to burnout, which is caused by being overwhelmed and high interpersonal stress due to their work (Arnett, 2016). Another factor of work related stress includes dealing with unemployment after one involuntarily leaves their job and cannot manage to find another job (Arnett, 2016). Midlife adults tend to be unemployed longer than young adults (Arnett, 2016). Another threat to stress is financial stress, which is also unavoidable. No one enjoys dealing with their finances and paying bills. According to a study done by Lin, Hsu, & Chang (2011), in middle adulthood, females suffered from chronic stress when dealing with finances, while men had little stress when dealing with finances. Overall, about 50% of the people examined in this study suffered from some level of stress when dealing with finances (Lin, Hsu, & Chang,