This study provides some initial support for the reliability and validity of the OEE scale. Outcome expectations for exercise were related to exercise behavior in the older adult, and the OEE scale can help identify older adults with low outcome expectations for exercise. Interventions can then be implemented to help these individuals strengthen their outcome expectations, which may subsequently improve exercise behavior.

The model of aging that people construct influences interpretations of and responses to actual situations when they occur, as well as preparatory actions that people take. Thus the question of what people foresee for themselves and the process by which they construct and revise this subjective aging trajectory has implications for such issues as health behavior, retirement planning, migration and residential moves, and advance directives, as well as for overall well-being in old age. This exploratory, hypothesis-generating study found that informants referred frequently to the course of aging and the events they envisioned in their own futures. The analysis delineates 1) types of events that older people see as part of aging in general and their own aging in particular, 2) factors and processes that enter into the construction of the subjective trajectory of aging, and 3) feeling and behavioral responses to the imagined future.

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This paper reports on two studies, based on ethnographic interviews, of expectations about recovery from hip fracture. Interviewed were community residing elderly who had not experienced a hip fracture and 11 hospitalized hip fracture patients aged 59 to 85 years. Community elderly foresaw permanent impairment and social death. Hip fracture patients altered their expectations in response to observed progress and communications from health professionals. Perceptions of their own functional health also shaped these expectations. Several ways are suggested for social workers to use their observations of patients' expectations, and how they are constructing them, to guide interventions.