The study, led by Ogochukwu Kelechi Onyeso of the University of Lethbridge and colleagues at institutions in Canada and Nigeria, used a qualitative description design to explore how community-dwelling older adults understand the sociodemographic forces behind mobility decline. The researchers recruited eighteen Canadian and eighteen Nigerian participants aged 65 to 89 years through community-based organisations, deliberately drawing from diverse sociodemographic strata. Of the 36 participants, 47.2 percent were women, 66.7 percent had a spouse or partner, and 86.1 percent were middle-income earners. Semi-structured interviews captured participants’ own experiences of, and observations about, losing the capacity to move freely, and the transcripts were analysed using conventional content analysis.

From this analysis, the team organised the findings into four broad domains: demographic, socioeconomic, sociocultural, and socioenvironmental factors. Within the demographic domain, participants identified older age itself, the experience of ageism, the burden of women’s traditional gender roles, and singlehood or widowhood as forces perceived to erode mobility. The comparison between the two countries proved especially revealing here. Nigerian participants described gender-related influences on mobility decline, while most Canadian participants perceived no such gender effect — a divergence the researchers attribute to cultural differences in how gender and ageing are understood and lived in the two societies.

The socioeconomic domain highlighted education, occupation type, and income as perceived determinants of how mobility unfolds across the life course. This aligns with a substantial body of epidemiological work showing that socioeconomic position accumulates its effects over decades: physically demanding occupations may wear down joints and the spine, lower educational attainment can limit health literacy and access to preventive care, and constrained income restricts everything from nutritious food to safe housing and assistive devices. What the new study adds is the voice of older adults themselves, describing how these forces played out in their own lives and in the lives of people around them.

Sociocultural factors emerged as a third pillar. Participants pointed to traditional dietary patterns, religious practices, and social participation as influences on their mobility trajectories. In the Nigerian context, traditional diets and communal religious life are deeply woven into daily routines, and the study suggests these patterns can either support or constrain physical activity and movement depending on the circumstances. Social participation — belonging to groups, attending gatherings, remaining embedded in community life — was perceived as a resource that helps sustain mobility, echoing the well-documented association between social engagement and physical function in later life.

The fourth domain, socioenvironmental factors, produced one of the study’s most striking findings: a direct reversal of perception between the two national groups. Most Canadian participants believed that rural dwellers experience poorer mobility, while Nigerian participants believed the opposite — that rural living is associated with better mobility. The divergence makes sense when the two environments are placed side by side. In Canada, rural areas can mean long distances to services, limited public transport, and harsh winters that isolate residents. In Nigeria, rural life often involves habitual walking, agricultural work, and close-knit communities, even where formal infrastructure is lacking. The same category of environment, in other words, carries opposite mobility implications depending on the surrounding economic and policy context.

Housing quality and climatic challenges also featured prominently in participants’ accounts. Urban versus rural living conditions, the physical characteristics of the home, and the demands imposed by climate were all perceived to shape how freely older adults can move. For the Canadian participants, cold winters and icy conditions represent a recurring barrier to safe walking and outdoor activity. For Nigerian participants, heat, seasonal rains, and uneven infrastructure present their own hazards. These observations underscore that mobility is not simply an attribute of the individual but a product of the continuous interaction between a body and its surroundings.

Beyond cataloguing influences, the researchers documented the recommendations participants offered for mitigating mobility decline. Older adults in both countries advocated for supportive environments and for policies that recognise the unique sociodemographic contexts in which people age. The authors argue that policymakers can enhance equity in ageing experiences by implementing age-friendly community initiatives that support the mobility of older adults, with particular attention to low-resource and rural areas. Such initiatives — a concept championed by the World Health Organization — typically address features like walkable streets, accessible public transport, safe pedestrian crossings, affordable housing, and opportunities for social participation, all of which map directly onto the four domains identified in the study.

The study’s life-course framing is central to its significance. Rather than treating mobility decline as an event of old age, the research situates it as the endpoint of decades of accumulated advantage and disadvantage. A woman whose gender role confined her to physically taxing domestic labour, a worker whose occupation damaged joints, a widow who lost the social and practical support of a partner, a rural resident whose environment either demands daily walking or makes it impossible — each carries a different mobility history into later life. By asking older adults to reflect on these histories, the study captures dimensions of decline that clinical measures of gait speed or grip strength cannot.

The comparative design also carries methodological weight. Qualitative studies of ageing are frequently conducted within a single national context, and findings are sometimes generalised as if universal. This study demonstrates that even basic assumptions — whether gender matters for mobility, whether rural life helps or harms — can flip between high-income and low-resource settings. For global health, the implication is that mobility interventions cannot be transplanted wholesale from wealthy to lower-income contexts. Policies must be calibrated to the cultural, economic, and environmental realities of the population they serve. As the world’s population ages, with the fastest growth occurring in low- and middle-income countries, understanding these contextual differences becomes not an academic luxury but a practical necessity for preserving independence, dignity, and quality of life in old age.

Subject of Research: Life-course sociodemographic influences on mobility decline in older adults in Canada and Nigeria

Article Title: Life-course sociodemographic influences on mobility decline: a comparative qualitative study of older adults’ perspectives in Canada and Nigeria

Article References: Onyeso, O. K., Victor, J., Onyeso, K. M., Ojembe, B. U., Alumona, C. J., Odole, A. C., Doan, J., & Awosoga, O. A. (2026). Life-course sociodemographic influences on mobility decline: a comparative qualitative study of older adults’ perspectives in Canada and Nigeria. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08359-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08359-w

Keywords: mobility decline, healthy ageing, older adults, life course, social determinants of health, qualitative research, Canada, Nigeria, age-friendly communities, rural ageing, gender roles, gerontology

The team reconstructed each participant’s work history from age 18 to 50, converting retrospective reports of full-time work, part-time work, caregiving, unemployment, and disability leave into a 33-year sequence of annual states. Using a technique called sequence analysis, which treats an entire life course as an ordered pattern rather than a snapshot, they identified four distinct employment trajectories. Roughly half of respondents followed a Stable Full-Time path, entering continuous full-time work early and staying attached through midlife. A smaller group, about 8 percent, experienced Late Workforce Entry, remaining out of paid work into their late twenties or thirties. About 30 percent cycled through Multiple Job Disruptions, and roughly 11 percent drifted into Long-Term Non-Employment, withdrawing from the labor force from their late twenties onward with little re-entry before age 50.

The trajectories themselves were clearly patterned by race and ethnicity. White adults were the most likely to follow the stable full-time path, at 52 percent, compared with 45 percent of Black adults and 39 percent of Hispanic adults. Black and Hispanic respondents were roughly twice as likely as White respondents to enter the workforce late, with adjusted models showing odds ratios of 2.26 and 2.45 respectively. Notably, once the researchers controlled for education, nativity, childhood health, and other factors, the racial differences concentrated almost entirely in delayed entry rather than in mid-career disruption or chronic joblessness. Nativity mattered too: U.S.-born adults had only about a quarter the odds of late entry compared with foreign-born adults, suggesting that migration timing and credentialing barriers partly shape Hispanic workers’ delayed starts.

To measure biological aging, the team turned to epigenetic clocks, mathematical models that read chemical tags called methyl groups at specific sites across the genome to estimate how fast the body is wearing down. They applied five widely used clocks: Horvath and Hannum, first-generation models trained simply to predict chronological age, and PhenoAge, GrimAge, and DunedinPACE, second-generation clocks designed to capture health-relevant aging, physiological dysregulation, and mortality risk. Epigenetic age acceleration, or EAA, is the gap between the clock’s estimate and a person’s actual age. Positive values signal that someone’s body is aging faster than the calendar says it should, a pattern previously linked to frailty, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and earlier death, often before any clinical diagnosis appears.

The racial contrasts were striking and clock-dependent. Black adults showed significantly faster acceleration than White adults on DunedinPACE and GrimAge, the two clocks most tightly tied to stress-related biological wear and mortality, with standardized differences of roughly a quarter to a third of a standard deviation. Yet on the Hannum clock, Black adults actually showed slower acceleration, and Hispanic adults showed marginally slower Horvath acceleration. This is not a contradiction but a lesson in measurement: first-generation clocks mostly track chronological time, while second-generation clocks index the cumulative physiological toll that the weathering hypothesis describes, the idea that chronic exposure to economic insecurity, discrimination, and occupational hazard becomes embedded in neuroendocrine, inflammatory, and immune systems over decades.

The study’s central surprise came when the researchers asked whether employment trajectories themselves predicted epigenetic aging. They largely did not. After adjusting for covariates, none of the three non-stable trajectories showed a significant association with acceleration on any of the five clocks, relative to stable full-time work. Nor did employment trajectories significantly moderate racial differences in aging; joint statistical tests of all race-by-trajectory interactions were non-significant across every clock. In other words, the shape of a person’s work life, measured purely as timing, continuity, and attachment, carried little independent signal about how fast their cells were aging once broader social circumstances were taken into account.

But the within-trajectory comparisons told a different and more consequential story. Among people who had followed the Stable Full-Time path, the very trajectory usually treated as protective, Black adults still showed higher DunedinPACE acceleration than White adults, and the groups differed significantly on three of the five clocks. Stable employment, the analysis showed, was not the same experience across racial lines. Supplemental data revealed that White workers in this trajectory were far more often in professional and managerial occupations, about 38 percent, while Black workers were concentrated in service and sales roles, about 53 percent. The same thirty-year label concealed radically different exposures to job control, hazards, benefits, discrimination, and strain. Even after adjusting for broad occupational categories, Black-White differences on DunedinPACE and GrimAge persisted, implying that occupational sorting explains only part of the racialized conditions embedded within apparently similar careers.

A parallel pattern emerged within the Long-Term Non-Employment group, where Black adults again showed faster GrimAge and DunedinPACE acceleration than White adults. The composition of this group differed sharply by race: White respondents were overwhelmingly female, at 85 percent, and had more often left professional, managerial, or office positions, a profile consistent with resourced exits into homemaking or caregiving. Black respondents were more concentrated in service and production work and included a larger share of men, suggesting exits more often tied to job loss, displacement, disability, or constrained labor-market options. The researchers also found that the reasons behind non-employment in the Multiple Job Disruption group diverged by race, with White adults’ non-working years most often attributed to caregiving, Black adults’ to unemployment, and Hispanic adults’ to disability or medical leave. The same trajectory, in short, can encode very different biographies of stress and security.

The authors are careful about causality. Epigenetic age was measured at a single point in 2016, employment histories were reconstructed retrospectively and may carry recall error, and the DNA methylation subsample was non-random, with survival to biomarker collection potentially selecting healthier respondents and muting true racial differences. Small subgroup cells, particularly within the non-employment trajectory, mean some comparisons are descriptive rather than definitive. The trajectories also captured the timing and continuity of work but not wages, job security, workplace discrimination, or physical demands, all of which prior research has linked to accelerated aging. Adverse work conditions such as low job control, night shifts, and long hours have each been associated with roughly 1.4 to 2.1 years of accelerated epigenetic aging in earlier studies.

Even with those caveats, the implications are hard to ignore. The findings suggest that racial disparities in biological aging do not arise mainly because Black and Hispanic workers are sorted into unstable employment pathways; they arise, at least in substantial part, because the conditions within similar pathways are unequal, and because the health returns to stable work itself are diminished for Black Americans. That reframes the policy conversation: simply promoting employment stability or longer careers will not close aging gaps if the jobs available to racialized workers remain lower-paid, less protected, and more hazardous. What gets under the skin, this study argues, is not the absence of work but the unequal character of the work people do, and the cumulative weight of disadvantage that follows them from their first job to their last.

Subject of Research: Racial and ethnic disparities in life-course employment trajectories and epigenetic age acceleration among older U.S. adults

Article Title: Employment Trajectories and Biological Aging: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Work Instability and Epigenetic Age Acceleration

Article References: Lai, W.-H., Lin, T.-S., Cho, T.-C., Meier, H. C., Ammous, F., & Leggett, A. N. (2026). Employment Trajectories and Biological Aging: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Work Instability and Epigenetic Age Acceleration. SSM – Population Health, Article 101973. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101973

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101973

Keywords: epigenetic clocks, biological aging, employment trajectories, health disparities, weathering hypothesis, DNA methylation, Health and Retirement Study, GrimAge, DunedinPACE, racial inequality, labor market, life course

The study, published in the Journal of Population Research by Georges Alain Tchango Ngalé and Solène Lardoux of the Université de Montréal and Vissého Adjiwanou of the Université du Québec à Montréal, draws on retrospective data from the research project Trajectoires individuelles et dynamiques de participation des femmes et des hommes à la société québécoise, known as TrajIPaQ. That project reconstructed the detailed job and residential histories of 1,392 Quebec residents across the fifteen-year window from 2005 to 2020. By stitching together year-by-year records of employment entries, exits and address changes, the team could ask a question that most surveys cannot answer: not simply whether jobs and moves are related, but exactly when the housing response occurs relative to the employment event.

The methodological core of the paper is a family of survival models known as Prentice-Williams-Peterson, or PWP, models, which are designed for analyzing recurrent events such as repeated residential moves. Rather than treating each person as a single data point, these models treat each successive move as a distinct event in an ordered sequence, allowing the researchers to estimate how the risk of moving shifts in the same year as a job transition, in the years before it, and in the years after it. The team complemented this approach with fixed-effects logistic models, a robustness check that controls for stable individual characteristics, ensuring the results were not simply an artifact of some people being more mobile in general than others.

This temporal decomposition matters because life course theory suggests that major events do not influence behavior only at the moment they occur. People may anticipate a transition, for example by scouting neighborhoods before signing an employment contract, or they may lag behind it, postponing a move until savings accumulate or a lease expires. The researchers therefore modeled three distinct effects: synchronous effects, which capture movement in the same year as the job transition; anticipatory effects, which capture movement in the year before; and lagged effects, which capture movement in the one or two years following. The resulting picture is one of the job-housing relationship as a temporally extended process rather than a single synchronized decision.

Among the general population of Quebec residents, job entries emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictor of residential mobility. The synchronous effect was robust, but so were the lagged effects, meaning that people who started a new job remained at elevated risk of moving for up to two years afterward. This persistence fits the classical interpretation from urban economics and sociology: a new job changes the calculus of commuting, income and housing needs, and households adjust their dwelling when circumstances allow. Job exits also predicted mobility, though with a weaker and less extended temporal signature, consistent with the idea that leaving a job reduces income and often delays rather than accelerates relocation, at least until financial pressures or unemployment duration force a housing change.

The sharpest finding, however, concerns immigrants. For this group, the extended temporal structure largely disappeared. Only the synchronous effect of job entry remained statistically visible, and neither anticipatory nor lagged effects could be detected. In other words, immigrants who moved in connection with a new job did so in the same year, and the cascade of delayed adjustments seen among the broader population was absent. The authors interpret this not as evidence that immigrants are less responsive to employment change, but as evidence that their capacity to fine-tune housing over time is constrained. Rental market pressures in metropolitan Montreal, tenure asymmetries between renters and owners, and the difficulties of navigating an unfamiliar housing system all plausibly compress the window in which immigrants can act on changed employment circumstances.

Within the immigrant population itself, further heterogeneity emerged when the researchers disaggregated by age at arrival and length of residence. Immigrants who arrived before the age of 25, a threshold chosen because it broadly marks the end of emerging adulthood and the point at which residential independence and labor market entry typically consolidate, displayed anticipatory effects, moving in the year before a job transition. This suggests that those socialized largely within Quebec, who completed their education and entered adulthood there, behave more like the native-born population, preparing their housing in advance of employment changes. By contrast, recent immigrants displayed a reversed temporality: for them, residential moves tended to precede job exits rather than follow job entries. The authors suggest this pattern may reflect the well-documented secondary migration of newcomers during their first years in Canada, when initial settlement locations are often abandoned in favor of areas with better employment prospects or established community networks.

The Quebec context sharpens the significance of these findings. The province has experienced sustained rental market tension, particularly in the Montreal metropolitan area, where vacancy rates have fallen and rents have risen sharply, and advocacy organizations have documented the growing difficulty that tenants, and especially immigrant tenants, face in finding affordable and adequate housing. Homeownership, which stabilizes housing and anchors households in place, is also unevenly distributed by immigration status, and tenure transitions themselves were tracked in the study as part of the residential histories. Against this backdrop, the compression of the job-housing temporal chain among immigrants looks less like a cultural preference and more like an institutional outcome, produced by housing scarcity, discrimination risks in the rental market and the precarious position many immigrants occupy in the labor market during their early years in the province.

The policy implications that the authors draw are correspondingly specific. If job entries mark a critical period during which immigrants would benefit from relocating, but structural barriers prevent them from doing so except in an immediate and often reactive way, then housing support targeted around the period of labor market entry becomes a rational intervention. The authors point to the importance of targeted housing assistance for immigrants as they transition into employment, alongside broader policy attention to the structural barriers, rental market pressures and tenure asymmetries that delay residential adjustment across the population as a whole. More generally, the study adds to a growing body of life course research insisting that the timing of linked events, not merely their co-occurrence, is central to understanding how people navigate jobs, homes and family lives.

What makes the study methodologically notable is its demonstration that a familiar statistical relationship can conceal fundamentally different processes underneath. A simple cross-tabulation of job changes and moves would show an association for both immigrants and non-immigrants, but the survival analysis reveals that the underlying temporal machinery differs: an extended, phased adjustment for most residents, and a compressed, synchronous response for immigrants, with anticipatory behavior among those who arrived young and a reversed sequence among newcomers. The job-housing relationship, the authors conclude, is not universal. It is conditioned by migration profile and by the institutional features of the receiving context, and understanding it requires data and models capable of distinguishing when things happen, not just whether they happen together. For a province negotiating rapid demographic change alongside a strained housing market, that distinction may prove consequential for both research and policy in the years ahead.

Subject of Research: The relationship between job transitions and residential mobility in Quebec and how its timing differs by immigration status

Article Title: Job transitions and residential mobility among Quebec residents: synchronous, lagged, and anticipatory effects by immigration status

Article References: Job transitions and residential mobility among Quebec residents: synchronous, lagged, and anticipatory effects by immigration status. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-026-09435-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12546-026-09435-z

Keywords: Quebec, residential mobility, job transitions, immigration status, survival analysis, life course, housing market, rental market, age at arrival, length of residence, labour market entry, Journal of Population Research

The findings, published in Applied Research in Quality of Life, come from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study, one of the most ambitious efforts ever mounted to understand human well-being across cultures. In this preregistered analysis, a team led by Richard G. Cowden of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University examined associations between 13 individual characteristics and retrospectively assessed childhood factors and the adult experience of perceiving divine punishment. With a sample of 202,898 participants spanning nations on every inhabited continent, the study offers an unusually broad window into how early life may shape one of the most intimate dimensions of religious experience.

Religious and spiritual struggles, as psychologists define them, are tensions and conflicts over spiritual matters. They can take many forms: anger at God, doubts about ultimate meaning, moral struggles, conflicts with fellow believers, or the perception that a malevolent supernatural force is at work. The form examined in this study—divine punishment—is among the most clinically significant. Prior research has linked such struggles to elevated psychological distress, poorer physical health outcomes, and even increased mortality among medically ill patients, making it important to understand where these experiences come from and who is most vulnerable.

Methodologically, the study took an unusually rigorous approach for cross-cultural research. The investigators estimated country-level modified Poisson models, a statistical framework well suited to modeling binary outcomes such as whether or not a person reports perceiving divine punishment. In each country, the outcome was regressed on all candidate predictors simultaneously, allowing the researchers to estimate the unique contribution of each factor while holding the others constant. They then aggregated results for the 11 predictors common across countries using random-effects meta-analysis, a technique that treats each country’s estimate as an observation of a shared underlying effect while formally accounting for variation between nations.

The meta-analytic risk ratios revealed three broad families of predictors. The first was individual characteristics: male gender, for example, was associated with a higher likelihood of perceiving divine punishment in adulthood, a pattern that runs counter to the broader finding in the psychology of religion that women tend to be more religiously engaged than men on most measures. The second family comprised early-life conditions and experiences. Two stood out: childhood abuse and feeling like an outsider within one’s own family. Both were associated with an elevated likelihood of later perceiving divine punishment, echoing a growing literature connecting childhood adversity to religious and spiritual struggles in adulthood.

The third family involved social circumstances and influences. Greater childhood financial difficulty predicted a higher likelihood of adult divine punishment perceptions, suggesting that socioeconomic adversity during the formative years may leave a durable imprint on how people interpret their relationship with the sacred. More surprisingly, more frequent religious service attendance during childhood was also associated with a higher likelihood of adult divine punishment. This finding does not necessarily imply that religion itself breeds spiritual distress. Rather, the researchers note, children raised in highly religious environments may simply have richer conceptual frameworks for understanding suffering in theological terms—including the idea that misfortune reflects divine displeasure—making such appraisals more cognitively available in adulthood.

The theoretical significance of these results lies in what they say about the life course. Drawing on life-course epidemiology and Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, the authors frame perceiving divine punishment as an outcome patterned by the interplay of individual, relational, and socioeconomic forces that unfold over decades. Attachment theory offers one influential lens: early relationships with caregivers, particularly when marked by abuse or exclusion, may be internalized as templates for later relationships with God. A child who experiences parental figures as harsh, rejecting, or unpredictable may, as an adult, more readily construe the divine along similar lines. Studies of parental attachment and God image have lent support to this correspondence hypothesis, and the new findings extend it to a far larger and more culturally diverse sample.

Yet the picture is not uniform. The associations were somewhat heterogeneous across countries, meaning the strength—and in some cases the direction—of the links varied from one national context to another. This heterogeneity is itself informative. Religious doctrines differ in how prominently divine punishment features, and cultural norms shape whether such experiences are considered normal, shameful, or pathological. Economic conditions, family structures, and the role of religious institutions in public life all differ across the 22 countries studied. A childhood predictor that looms large in one setting may be buffered or amplified in another, a nuance that single-country studies of spiritual struggle have largely been unable to capture.

The practical stakes of this work are considerable. Religious and spiritual struggles are not merely private theological puzzles; growing evidence indicates they can affect whole-person functioning, including mental health, physical health, and social relationships. If childhood factors help pattern who experiences these struggles, then interventions—whether delivered by clergy, chaplains, mental health professionals, or community organizations—could be designed with vulnerable populations in mind. Adults with histories of childhood abuse, family exclusion, or economic deprivation may warrant particular attention in pastoral care and spiritually integrated psychotherapy, not because their perception of divine punishment is irrational, but because it is traceable to identifiable developmental origins that can be addressed.

The study also sets a methodological benchmark. By preregistering its research questions, variables, and analytic plan with the Center for Open Science before accessing data, and by making all analysis code openly available, the team reduced the risk of undisclosed analytic flexibility—a chronic concern in cross-cultural psychology. The data themselves are publicly accessible, inviting independent replication and extension. As the Global Flourishing Study moves into subsequent waves, researchers will be able to examine whether early-life predictors measured more precisely, and outcomes tracked longitudinally, confirm and refine the picture sketched here. For now, the message is striking: the way adults imagine God’s attitude toward them may carry the fingerprints of their earliest years, written differently in every culture but legible across them all.

Subject of Research: Childhood predictors of perceiving divine punishment as a form of religious and spiritual struggle in adulthood across 22 countries

Article Title: Early-Life Predictors of Perceiving Divine Punishment in Adulthood Across 22 Countries

Article References: Cowden, R. G., Henry, J., Harris, C., Johnson, K. A., Case, B., Padgett, R. N., Johnson, B. R., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2026). Early-Life Predictors of Perceiving Divine Punishment in Adulthood Across 22 Countries. Applied Research in Quality of Life. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-026-10644-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-026-10644-0

Keywords: divine punishment, religious struggles, childhood adversity, Global Flourishing Study, life course, psychology of religion, meta-analysis, attachment theory, cross-cultural research, spiritual struggles, childhood abuse, well-being