The Life Course Development (LCD) program hosted January’s Coffee and Donuts with the SRC Director. Pamela Davis-Kean and Noah Webster chatted about the work LCD does and how important all social ties are to healthy aging.

Noah Webster’s research with the Life Course Development (LCD) program examines the impact of social ties on healthy aging and well-being. These relationships range from the deep ties of family and friends, to weaker ties such as neighbors and group memberships. Dr. Webster is also part of the Urban & Environmental Studies (UES) program which investigates cultural issues of sustainability and climate change in institutional settings including universities.

Dr. Webster is interested in the impact of the environment on our social relationships, linking his work with LCD and UES in several ways: “One is a consideration of the role of the social relationships in shaping resiliency as well as risk in the context of increasingly common severe weather events.” To this end, he works with Robert Marans in UES and Toni Antonucci in LCD to “expand existing theories of social relations to incorporate the natural environment as a critical context that can shape the development and role of our social relationships.”

Dr. Webster also co-leads the Sustainability Cultural Indicators Program (SCIP), a comprehensive study designed to assess sustainability knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes among University of Michigan (U-M) students, faculty, and staff over time across our three campuses. Using this data, Webster and LCD have been exploring how similarity of views on climate change within friendship networks impact life course differences.

In UES, Webster studies the impact of built and natural environments on quality of life, which informs work he is doing with colleagues at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability and College of Engineering, which is focused on the use of green infrastructure to address environmental-related challenges.

Informed by UES work on the built environment, Dr. Webster has working on an ongoing project in LCD to understand the role of social networks in lower income housing communities to promote health-related behaviors. A UES colleague (Robert Marans) and Dr. Webster recently published an edited book on the topic of quality life, highlighting our and others’ work focused on the role of place and space.

See a playlist of the Coffee and Donuts with the SRC Director series.