The Complexity Hierarchy of Behavioral Competence

              The Complexity Hierarchy of Behavioral Competence1 Margret Baltes led gerontology steadily throughout her career toward both theoretical and empirical advances. I am grateful for the opportunity to participate today in this combined memorial and scientific celebration of her contributions. I am especially glad that Marsiske and Margrett have provided us with reminders of specific contributions she made as her career progressed, including her collaborative work with Laura Carstensen in the last new phase of her work. I ' d like to begin my comments by anchoring her perspectives in the broadest conceptual framework. One of the tasks of gerontological research has been to disaggregate the components of the major elements of Lewin's ecological equation, as has been evident in the study of health, personality, environment, and psychological well-being. Behavior is what we specialize in and that is the constant thread in Margret's work. Disaggregation means differentiating, measuring, and explaining different forms of activity as both antecedents and consequences of human goal striving. Beginning with the basic distinction Sidney Katz made long ago between self-care activity and other forms of behavior, Margret and her associates have focused attention on the way physical and cognitive impairment affect other facets of daily life. This effect is reflected in the way people use their time in other sectors of life. We now have at least 4 well-defined ranges of competence worthy of study, whose significance has been clarified by the work of the people she has influenced. First are the basic ADLs, those necessary to everyday life, whose If the person cannot perform them, someone else must, performance is not discretionary. otherwise the person will die. The next category includes what Elaine Brody and I first named IADLS. These are more complex daily behaviors also necessary for life maintenance. But the 1 Delivered at symposium honoring Margaret Baltes, APA, Washington, DC, August 5,2000. 1 C:\evie\XLAWTON\MS\ComplexHierarcBehavComp.doc goals attained by their performance offer alternative modes of accomplishment, and there is more variability associated with their social and environmental contexts. Willis and her associates have by now demonstrated the utility of distinguishing further between instrumental behaviors with lower and higher cognitive demands. This third band of cognitively complex everyday activities then merges with discretionary activities, those determined primarily by personal preferences, social norms, and environmental press or affordances. We recognize that there are fuzzy sets that we name individually only for convenience. Margret's work on ADLs and ADL dependencies and on time-budget data went far beyond the simple measurement of these essential functions into the realm of explanation and, in the case of socially reinforced dependency, to control and intervention. Gerontology has been less successful in either measuring, explaining, or controlling more complex behaviors in the discretionary realm. Thus a fitting newer direction of her work came in her collaboration with Laura Carstensen, where the most complex domain of social behavior was the focus--see the very interesting research presented today by Marsiske and Margrett. Along with her extraordinarily careful research on the tesserae of behavior, she was able to pattern all of it into the mosaic of the theoretical framework Paul and she developed, selective optimization with compensation. I see this framework as one that demands extension of the conceptions of competence, environmental press, personal choice, and ultimate quality of goal attainment into the more complex domains that encompass the discretionary activities. How do we provide an evaluative framework for domains as complex as environmental or leisure activity, social behavior, altruistic pursuits, and the largest life planning activities? How are we to make the concept of competence relevant to these domains where both personal choice and environmental opportunity are such potent determinants? The paper by Dr. Marsiske and Dr. Margrett illustrates our ability to extend the concept C:\evie\XLAWTON\MS\ComplexHierarcBehavComp.doc 2 of "competence" into the social domain. They demonstrated a general tendency toward more competent problem-solving in the collaborative as opposed to the solitary mode. This provides probabilistic support for the assertion that collaboration is better than solo, notwithstanding all the possibly countervailing factors such as personal preference for autonomous activity or lack of choice regarding which mode was imposed. The work of Dixon and associates regarding familiar couples' superior performance similarly attests to an operational definition of some interpersonal tie as an indicator of higher social competence. Now we can ask further questions, such as, "Can the disinclination to collaborate, or the inability to collaborate, be used as an indication of social incompetence?" I'd like to spend a few minutes on a conceptual scheme that the team of Barry Gurland, Sid Katz, Doug Holmes, Jeanne Teresi and I are working on that might be of use in extending the concept of competence into the more complex domains of everyday life. Gurland and Katz have for some time been developing an approach to expanding the scale of competence in everyday activities, specifically the range of the scale that precedes the point of ADL dependence. We are working with the concept of "inefficiency" to capture functional problems of a minor sort that may (though not necessarily) be harbingers of more malignant malfunction. Inefficiency may be illustrated by the following longish though far from complete list of inefficiency manifestations: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Increased time to make a decision or perform a task Increased effort Use of aids (physical or personal) Task performance with pain or fatigue Task performance with worry or embarrassment Decreased quality of task performance Continued performance despite increased danger 3 C:\evie\XLAWTON\MS\ComplexHierarcBehavComp.doc 8. 9. 10. 111 12. 13. Interrupted sequences of behaviors or omitted segments Increased redundancy of task segment performance Increased muscular or physiological reserve depletion Increased tolerance required from significant others Displacement of discretionary activities by obligatory activities Substitution of less-preferred for more-preferred goals. Everyone here will recognize elective optimization with compensation in this list. It is also clear that every inefficiency may also be a means of attaining a goal. We thus have the sequences physical depletion (poor health) -- inefficient behavior -- goal attainment. > > To the extent that inefficient behavior results nonetheless in goal attainment by alternative means the inefficient behavior may be considered successful coping or compensation. Failure to attain the goal marks the inefficient behavior as unsuccessful coping and is indicated by a transition to ADL dependence or a state of depression and other states of psychological ill-being. Thus, it is clear that inefficiency is the obverse of SOWC. What we hope to do is to conceptualize and operationalize better all the domains in which SOWC occurs and to stretch the width of our measurement capability to encompass the varieties of inefficiency, the varieties of compensatory activity, and the quality of the goal attained. We hope that Margret's and Paul's major conceptual breakthrough will continue to guide us and other investigators toward a finer differentiation of these processes that both diminish performance and at the same time offer positive channels for controlling the loss. C:\evie\XLAWTON\MS\ComplexHierarcBehavComp.doc