Challenges Experienced at Age 100: Findings From the Fordham Centenarian Study

ABSTRACT

This article examines the challenges experienced by very old individuals and their consequences for well-being and mental health. In order to capture unique issues experienced in very old age, 75 participants of the population-based Fordham Centenarian Study answered open-ended questions on everyday challenges. Theme-based coding was then used to categorize and quantify responses. The challenges mentioned most often were challenges faced in the functional (e.g., physical health/activities of daily living restrictions, mobility, sensory impairment), psychological (e.g., loss of well-liked activity, dependency, negative emotions, death), and social (e.g., family loss) life domains. Functional challenges were negatively associated with aging satisfaction and positively associated with loneliness. Psychological challenges were positively linked to aging satisfaction. Social challenges were marginally related to loneliness. Notably, challenges were not related to depression. In conclusion, the challenges experienced in very old age are multidimensional and multifaceted, unique in nature, and have differential relations to mental health. Functional, psychological, and social challenges affect very old individuals’ lives and therefore need to be better understood and addressed. Given their consequences, it is imperative for policy makers to develop an awareness for the different types of challenges faced by centenarians, as there may be unique policy implications related to each.     

Trend smoothness achieved by penalized least squares with the smoothing parameter chosen by optimality criteria

This work presents a study about the smoothness attained by the methods more frequently used to choose the smoothing parameter in the context of splines: Cross Validation, Generalized Cross Validation, and corrected Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria, implemented with Penalized Least Squares. It is concluded that the amount of smoothness strongly depends on the length of the series and on the type of underlying trend, while the presence of seasonality even though statistically significant is less relevant. The intrinsic variability of the series is not statistically significant and its effect is taken into account only through the smoothing parameter.     

Macht und Gender

What prevents women, who wish to pursue a career, from gaining power???If organizational micro-politics, which means using and developing power, is conceptualized as an acting competence, the acquisition of cognitive competences and also the willingness to act micro-politically will turn into focus, which can be regarded as an indicator for the integration of micro-political acting into a self-concept. According to common models of competences this illustrates self-competence. The interviews conducted with female young executives revealed that the willingness??more than the ??pure motivation to advance a career????represents a key factor to be successful in advancing a career. The willingness seems to be even more marked, the less the self-concept is linked to female gender-stereotype. With regards to this result it is discussed what this means to the development of micro-political competences for women.     

Job-Related Well-Being of Immigrants

Social Indicators Research - Considerable literature exists on the acculturation and adaptation of immigrants. For the most part, studies looked at their psychological and social adaptation to the...     

Public education provision,private schooling and income redistribution

Availability of free public education induces a transfer in kind among households with school age children. We provide evidence of the redistributive character of public education provision. We estimate structural quantile treatment effects of household income on the distribution of expected educational transfers in kind. Under the assumption that education quality is a normal good, better services (ancillary to the core education mission) supplied by private schools increase quality therein and reduce the incentives for wealthy households to enroll in public education. Because of these incentives, rich families benefit less from educational transfers in kind and the public education system is redistributive. Using household survey data from Italy, we find that an increase in net income reduces the value of the expected educational in kind transfers for compulsory education.     

Extending Bayesian back-calculation to estimate age and time specific HIV incidence

Lifetime Data Analysis - CD4-based multi-state back-calculation methods are key for monitoring the HIV epidemic, providing estimates of HIV incidence and diagnosis rates by disentangling their...     

Who Is Supporting Homeless Youth? Predictors of Support in Personal Networks

Homeless youth lack the traditional support networks of their housed peers, which increases their risk for poor health outcomes. Using a multilevel dyadic analytic approach, this study identified characteristics of social contacts, relationships, and social networks associated with the provision of tangible and emotional support to homeless youth (N = 419, M age = 20.09, SD = 2.80). Support providers were likely to be family members, sex partners, or non–street‐based contacts. The provision of support was also associated with contacts' employment and homelessness status, frequency of contact, shared risk behaviors, and the number of network members that were homeless and employed. The results provide insights into how homeless youth could be assisted to develop more supportive social networks.     

Sequential Monte Carlo for rare event estimation

This paper discusses a novel strategy for simulating rare events and an associated Monte Carlo estimation of tail probabilities. Our method uses a system of interacting particles and exploits a Feynman-Kac representation of that system to analyze their fluctuations. Our precise analysis of the variance of a standard multilevel splitting algorithm reveals an opportunity for improvement. This leads to a novel method that relies on adaptive levels and produces, in the limit of an idealized version of the algorithm, estimates with optimal variance. The motivation for this theoretical work comes from problems occurring in watermarking and fingerprinting of digital contents, which represents a new field of applications of rare event simulation techniques. Some numerical results show performance close to the idealized version of our technique for these practical applications.     

Women’s Movements in Portugal and Spain: Democratic Processes and Policy Outcomes

Portugal and Spain underwent dramatic transformations between 1974 and the early 1980s, transitioning from dictatorships to democracies. In this article I explore why Portugal was faster than Spain in adopting key gender-rights policies (e.g., divorce, equal pay, state feminism) during the period in question. Bridging insights from the democratization, social movement, and women’s studies literatures, I argue that Portugal’s accelerated policy path on women’s rights can be explained by three complex factors: (1) the nature of the revolutionary transition, which structured options for women’s movements and for institutional actors; (2) the configuration of movement-party alliances; and (3) supranational pressures to reorganize the state-civil society relationship. The study contributes to the engendering of democratization processes in Iberia by paying close attention to the interconnected agency of women’s movements with other political actors at a time of regime transformation.     

Corporate social responsibility and corporate governance in Italian SMEs: the experience of some “spirited businesses”

The study proposes to individuate the relationship between social engagement, social statements and governance of SMEs. Does an adhesion to the philosophy and to the practices of CSR, which are reflected in a firm’s mission and accountability, positively influences its governance? If so, is this influence more or less significant for SMEs with respect to large-sized firms? This paper winds itself around these questions and describes the principle findings that have emerged from a qualitative investigation focused on a selected group of “cohesive” Italian SMEs, in which their management complies with both economic and social issues. The empirical study finds that the diffusion of CSR is tied above all to the entrepreneur’s values and orientation and to the company embeddedness to the local socio-economic environment. The concluding reflections trace the features of a territorial model of socially responsible orientation centered on the best practices of SMEs who are excellent examples of “spirited businesses” and are part of a network (which includes institutions, trade associations, non-profit organizations, etc.) that contributes to the diffusion of an orientation towards CSR and to sustainability across the territory.