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Perceived control may promote social activity in older adults because individuals with greater perceived control have greater confidence in their ability to achieve outcomes and are more likely to choose difficult activities, show persistence, and employ strategies to overcome challenges. Cross-sectional research has linked perceived control with social activity in life span and older adult samples but provides little insight into the direction of influence. We examined reciprocal associations between perceived control and social activity in order to establish temporal sequencing, which is one prerequisite for determining potential causation.

Participants were 14,126 midlife and older adults from the German Ageing Survey. Using cross-lagged autoregressive modeling with age as the time metric (40–87 years), we examined reciprocal 3-year lagged associations …