Caregiver stressors and depressive symptoms among older husbands and wives in the United States

Framed by Pearlin’s Stress Process Model, this study prospectively examines the effects of primary stress factors reflecting the duration, amount, and type of care on the depressive symptoms of spousal caregivers over a2-year period, and whether the effects of stressors differ between husbands and wives. Data are from the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study and we included community-dwelling respondents providing activities of daily life (ADL) and/or instrumental activities of daily life (IADL) help to their spouses/partners (N = 774). Results from multivariate regression models indicate that none of the primary stressors were associated with depressive symptoms. However, wives providing only personal care had significantly more depressive symptoms than wives providing only instrumental care, while husbands providing different types of care showed no such differences. To illuminate strategies for reducing the higher distress experienced by wife caregivers engaged in personal care assistance, further studies are needed incorporating couples’ relational dynamics and gendered experiences in personal care.     

Life satisfaction: A study based on the organization of personal projects

A methodology about personal project was used to understand perceived life satisfaction. Variables derived from the Personal Project Matrix were shown to explain variability in reported life satisfaction in two separate studies (university and professional samples). The results indicated that personal projects of students had been organized in systems and these systems' properties had meaningful effects on life satisfaction. A cross-validation analysis revealed that professionals' projects did not show the same systemic feature which students' projects had. But some variables such as projects performed in general places, stress, and amount of reported obstacles discriminated life satisfaction scores meaningfully.     

Indicators of Preclinical Disability: Women's Experiences of an Aging Body

This paper is derived from a larger multimethod longitudinal study of women's bodily experiences and coping practices before the onset of disability. Twelve women participated in repeated performance measures, in-depth interviews of daily life and physically challenging events, and observations of daily activities conducted over 18 months. Interpretive phenomenological analysis of textual data showed that women's bodies provided multiple indicators or symptoms of preclinical disability. These indicators informed the women that their body was out of synch with their environment; conspicuous during social activities; and vulnerable to becoming dependent on others, technology, or assistive devices to accomplish daily activities. Greater attention to bodily indicators or symptoms may offer a practical method for clinicians to identify preclinical disability.     

Initiating Personal Growth: The Role of Recognition and Life Satisfaction on the Development of College Students

The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating role of life satisfaction between positive recognition and levels of personal growth initiative in a collegiate setting. The design of the research study utilized a quantitative research method. A brief questionnaire assessed 204 undergraduate students at a mid-sized university. The average age of the participants was 19 years old and the predominant race was Caucasian. Approximately the same number of male and female participants completed the survey. Each participant answered questions that measured perceived life satisfaction, personal growth initiative and the amount of recognition and praise received from family and overall within a typical college setting. Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the relationship between the variables. The hypothesized mediational model had adequate fit. Positive recognition and personal growth initiative were mediated by life satisfaction χ² (n = 204, 101) = 259.20, CFI = .88, TLI = .86. Results from this study hope to show that life satisfaction builds the relationship between receiving recognition and an undergraduate’s involvement in changing and developing as an individual. In addition, the study hopes to use the emerging field of Positive Psychology to identify applications of life satisfaction, personal growth initiative and recognition to assist with the optimal functioning of college students and the overall educational institution.     

Spousal Support of Older Women with Osteoporotic Pain: Congruity of Perceptions

ABSTRACT

Thirty-four couples were interviewed to assess the congruity of husbands' and wives' perceptions of the wives' osteoporotic pain and the exchange of instrumental support within the marital relationship. Moderate correlations were found between the husbands' and wives' ratings of two specific dimensions of the wives' pain experience: interference with daily life and pain severity. Wives who perceived their pain as more severe but as having a lesser impact on their personal lives provided the most frequent help to their husbands. The wives' pain perceptions were not predictive of the amount of assistance they perceived receiving from their spouses. Husbands' perceptions of their wives' pain experience were not predictive of the frequency of instrumental support they either received from or gave to their wives.     

Work status and the quality of life

The general thesis from which this paper derived is that objective conditions are related to perceptions and evaluations of those conditions, but that such relationships are mediated by personal characteristics such as expectation and aspiration levels, and other motivational factors. The specific relationship examined is that between work status and overall life satisfaction among women. Although there is little difference in average levels of life satisfaction expressed by housewives and by women working outside the home, substantial differences emerge when women are distinguished by their motivation with respect to paid work: among women who want jobs, working women are more satisfied with their lives than are housewives; while among those who would prefer not to work, housewives are more satisfied. Evidence is also found in support of a hypothesis that work tends to be less central to the overall quality of women's lives than is true for men.     

Unanticipated Consequences: A Comparison of Expected and Actual Retirement Timing Among Older Women

ABSTRACT

The present study adds to the growing body of literature on women and retirement by means of a comparative analysis of the factors associated with anticipated retirement timing (among pre-retirees) and actual retirement timing (among retirees). Adopting a political economy of aging perspective, we argue that socially-structured patterns of gender inequality related to women's multiple roles across the life course affect patterns of retirement timing. Specifically, we hypothesize that the gendered nature of women's work-retirement decision-making is unanticipated during pre-retirement years. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data drawn from a sample of 275 women aged 45 and older living in the Vancouver area of British Columbia. A central finding is that while actual timing of retirement is affected by family caregiving responsibilities and by health/stress factors, pre-retirees do not perceive these to be important in their own expected retirement timing. Implications for social policy, education, and women's financial and psychological well-being in old age are elaborated.     

Role Ambiguity Among Women Providing Care for Ex-Husbands

Twenty-one women were interviewed regarding their caregiving experiences for ill or dying ex-husbands. Emergent in the analyses was the variety of ways in which they experienced role ambiguity as ex-wife caregivers. This article describes the role ambiguity ex-wife caregivers encountered interpersonally through interactions with network members, institutionally in dealing with professionals and the workplace, and intrapersonally in confusion over their roles and feelings. Consequences of role ambiguity are discussed, and recommendations for policy and practice are made in light of the aging population, changing family forms, and women's care roles.     

American Catholicism and the International Family Planning Movement

This paper examines the role of the American Catholic Church in the international family planning movement and discusses elements of the Catholic opposition to birth control. The paper argues that the reaction of American Catholics to government support for contraceptive services was based not only on the Church's condemnation of particular contraceptive methods, but also on a variety of other factors including class and ethnic hostility between Catholics and the promoters of family planning, jurisdictional disputes over what institutions would guide family life, the perceived threat that government support of family planning was to the authority of the Church and the Church's understanding of sex and women. The role of an American theology of political compromise and accommodation in mitigating the American Catholic Church's opposition to organized family planning is assessed.     

Older Women and Beliefs About Exercise Risk:

Preliminary research suggests that some active older women perceive that the personal benefits of exercise far outweigh the risks. This study aimed to identify sociodemographic and lifestyle explanations for variations In older women's risk perceptions for six fitness activities. A convenience sample of 43 women aged 52 to 73 responded to a survey questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis controlling for age, hearth, and education indicated that those women who were-mothers held lower levels of perceived risk for late life exercise than women who had never experienced the motherhood role. The motherhood variable, along with current activity level, accounted for some 40% of the variance In risk perceptions, an unexpected finding which will require future confirmation. Several possible explanations for this result are presented.     

Living Productively with Sensory Loss

As the avenues for fully perceiving and experiencing life, our sensory organs are the bridge between Self and the outside world. Of the many disorders affecting the senses of the older woman, those that affect vision and hearing have the greatest potential for disrupting her activities of daily living, and diminishing her quality of life and level of independence. While adapting to and coping successfully with sensory loss may require significant effort and adjustment on the part of the afflicted older woman, strategies designed to maximize the older woman's function, her sense of personal control, and her social support system can mediate the negative effects of the sensory loss.     

The Meaning and Measurement of Productive Engagement in Later Life

This study draws from the work engagement literature to define engagement as an indicator of role quality and to develop a measure—The Productive Engagement Portfolio (PEP)—that can be used to assess engagement in work, volunteering, caregiving, and informal helping among older adults. A Rasch measurement approach was used to develop both Likert-based and semantic-differential-based measures of engagement across 4 roles. Items for both scales were developed through an iterative process that included focus groups, 4 pilot tests, and one full-scale administration. Results suggest that the psychological state of engagement can be conceptualized and measured on a meaningful continuum defining a unidimensional and hierarchical construct ranging from lower to higher levels of engagement. The technical characteristics of the items were found to be invariant across each productive role type for both measurement approaches and the meaning of person scores within a role were found to be independent of the response format for both approaches. Using score conversion charts designed to translate the scale scores into a form that is readily transparent and usable for practitioners, our scales can easily and meaningfully chart a person’s level of engagement pre- and post-intervention. The PEP instrument can also be used in survey research or by practitioners in community or medical settings to assess the extent to which older adults are involved in roles that enhance their overall quality of life.     

Women and Retirement

SUMMARY

A feminist analysis of retirement is presented by questioning the applicability of traditional definitions and theories of retirement to retired women. The effects of marriage, caregiving and other family obligations on women's retirement are examined within the context of salient social, psychological and economic factors. An empowerment-oriented perspective that considers interactions and connections between family and work roles, public and private and personal and political levels are recommended to alleviate the high poverty rates among older women, to promote parity among men and women during retirement and to emancipate women from substantial involvement in unpaid work, specifically, caregiving and home labor.     

Measuring Quality of Life

This paper considers quality of life (QOL) to be a global, yet unidimensional, subjective assessment of one's satisfaction with life. This conceptualization is consistent with viewing QOL assessments as resulting from the interaction of multiple causal dimensions, but it is inconsistent with proposals to limit QOL to health-related quality of life (HRQOL). We test the unidimensional yet global conceptualization of QOL using data from coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) patients. The Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (SASS) and four other indicators derived from the literature, all seemed to function as indicators of a single concept (QOL) that was repeatedly drawn upon as the patients determined their responses to these indicators. However, only about half the variance in each indicator was attributable to that common QOL source. Several structural equation models are used to assess whether the superior performance of the Life 3 indicator is an artifact of the repetition of an item within this indicator. The data convincingly indicate that the superior performance is not a memory artifact, and that even the repetition of an identically worded item prodded the patients into drawing yet again upon the same QOL factor that grounded all the other measures.     

“Be Patient,Dear Mother … Wait For Me”

In social reality, illness and death occur in myriad ways, yet Hollywood films have historically preferred spectacular, violent death over realist depictions of the terminal stages of life. Yet an ever-growing number of popular films, which I term neo-infirmity films, incorporate episodes of women characters debilitated by illness or injury. Operating at the intersection of melodrama and realism, the scenes are instrumental in staging contemporary cinema's gender politics. I argue that women's deathbed and hospital-bed scenes in contemporary cinema validate anew the maternal role and the figure of the mother, transporting the woman-centered discursive space of melodrama into narrative terrain often hostile to women's presence. Through this relocation, the films emphasize her importance to sons in particular (and less often to daughters, husbands, and the larger family unit). Many such scenes simultaneously undermine women's agency, reducing mothers to principally symbolic, literally immobile roles. Ailing women can become catalysts for male psychological transformation occurring through grief, action, or both in combination. In all, such scenes speak to continued ambivalence surrounding women's representation in popular cinema, and to continued patrolling of the boundaries of female power. This essay compares selected texts from contemporary Hollywood cinema, alongside three parallel discourses that also deploy melodramatic modes of articulation: nonfiction amateur video as relayed via television news programs, international art cinema, and US independent cinema. Arguing for homologies across multiple fields of textual production, I seek through this comparison to generate insights into the cultural work done by filmic representation.     

Role Strain Among Female Employees Caring for Frail Parents

This study of 114 employed female caregivers of frail parenls investigated predictors of role strain. Findings revealed that respondents with thi heaviest caregiving responsibaities, the most demanding jobs, the least supportive work environments, and the most work interferences were the most conflicted about their ability to perform well in both their work and parent care roles. The parent's impairment level had the greatest affect on work and family role conflict. Fudermore, these parent care duties spilled over into the work life. The female respondents' most frequently requested workplace changes were for counseling for themselves and long term care insurance for their parents. Implications of study findings are discussed.     

Aging Couples in Dual-Career/Earner Families:

The authors present results of an empirical study of 611 mature couples in a dual-career or dual-earner famil where at least one spouse is a member of The National Retired Teacher's Association and is retired. We hypothesize that degree of role-sharing will va among mature couples in this special population on the basis of sexcted personal and social characteristics. Through discriminant analysis we identify which personal and social variables best predict whether or not couples currently share roles. We also determine the change in role-sharing over time for these couples. Our hypothesis is confirmed.     

Positioning the self

This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking about women's magazines they formulated narratives about their own identities, and they drew on various discourses that placed women's magazines in relation to their subjective experiences of ordinary everyday life. A reflexive positioning of the self was therefore crucial to their mode of interpretation. The analysis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with subscribers to a popular Norwegian women's magazine, and the findings are discussed in the light of Anthony Giddens' theory of the reflexive self and Toril Moi's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist philosophy.     

Early Childbearing Patterns and Women's Labor Force Behavior in Later Life

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the consequences of early childbearing decisions for women's labor force activity in later life. Within a life course framework, women's early child-bearing activities may be linked to later life decisions. Women between ages 55 and 64 are evaluated from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Two measures of early family roles are considered: total fertility (number of children ever born) and timing of first-birth (childless, prior to age 30, and 30+). Results provide some limited support that early childbearing roles do in fact have a long-term impact on the employment decisions of women. Women who delay childbearing are somewhat more likely to remain in the labor force during their later years whereas women who remain childless are more likely to have exited the labor force.     

A test of the utility of social indicators for behavioral health service planning

Given current imperatives for more effective, responsive, and economical government, policy planners and administrators are seeking increasing assistance from social scientists. Here the usefulness of social indicators to the processes of policy planning and implementation in the delivery of mental health, alcohol and drug abuse services is investigated to determine whether social indicator data can contribute to more effective policy planning. In a two part study, the relationship between social indicators and Specific sources of these data were: population total, subdivided by geographic area and race (Caucasian, Black, and Other, which in Arizona is virtually all Native Americans) from the 1975 special census; population by age and ratio of dissolutions to marriages from the Arizona Statistical Review for 1977; crime rates from the Arizona State Justice Planning Agency for 1975; and cause of death rates from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Arizona Department of Health Services for 1975. Subjective measures of psychological well-being were not available for the internal validational component of the study. state wide service utilization rates and The Negative Affect Scale measures the individual's level of anxiety, worry, loneliness, and sadness, and is associated with other measures that have been used in epidemiological studies to identify persons with psychological difficulties. The Psychiatric Screening Inventory assesses an individual's level of psychiatric impairment as evidenced by the frequency with which he or she reports having experienced each of the 22 psychological and psychosomatic symptoms on the scale. It has also been used in numerous epidemiological studies to investigated levels of impairment among various populations. The Positive Affect Scale reflects the degree to which the person is involved with, interested in, and experiences control over his or her physical and social environment. Active involvement with the world and frequent social participation are considered to be conducive to the experience of positive affect. The Perceived Quality of Life Scale measures the degree to which the persons is satisfied with the quality of his or her life. The score on this scale is a composite of the respondent's level of satisfaction in different areas of life such as standard of living, health, personal functioning, and family life. The greater the satisfaction in these separate areas, the higher will be the individual's overall evaluation of the quality of his or her life. psychological well-being in the community is examined. Both objective and subjective social indicators were studied. Both types of indicators were found to be useful and complementary in identifying service needs and states of well-being in the community.