Families in Later Life: A Decade in Review

Later-life families encompass the legal, biological, romantic, and kin-like relationships of persons ages 65 and older. Research on older families has flourished over the past decade, as population aging has intensified concerns regarding the capacities of families to care for older adults and the adequacy of public pension systems to provide an acceptable standard of living. Shifting patterns of family formation over the past half-century have created a context in which contemporary older adults' family lives differ markedly from earlier generations. Decreasing numbers of adults are growing old with their first and only spouse, with rising numbers divorcing, remarrying, forming non-marital romantic partnerships, or living single by choice. Remarriage and the formation of stepfamilies pose challenges and opportunities as older adults negotiate complex decisions such as inheritance and caregiving. Family relationships are consequential for older adults' well-being, operating through both biological and psychosocial mechanisms. We synthesize research from the past decade, revealing how innovations in data and methods have refined our understanding of late-life families against a backdrop of demographic change. We show how contemporary research refines classic theoretical frameworks and tests emerging conceptual models. We organize the article around two main types of family relationships: (1) marriage and romantic partnerships and (2) intergenerational relationships. We discuss how family caregiving occurs within these relationships, and offer three promising avenues for future research: ethnic minority and immigrant families; older adults without close kin (“elder orphans”); and the potentials of rapidly evolving technologies for intergenerational relationships and caregiving.     

Editorial

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior -     

Kiva's Flat,Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor people's disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.org's lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.     

Child sex abuse and the Irish criminal justice system

The aims of this study were to develop scales to assess experiences of sexually abused children in the Irish criminal justice system (CJS); identify aspects of the CJS which children experience as negative; compare the perceptions of children, parents and professionals of sexually abused children's experiences of the CJS; and determine correlations between perceptions of children's CJS experiences and current psychological adjustment. Forty‐three children, 101 parents, 32 mental health professionals, 27 police officers and 21 lawyers completed parallel versions of the Criminal Justice System Questionnaire (CJSQ) which assessed satisfaction with aspects of the CJS relevant to sexually abused children, specifically: Gardaí (police), medical examination, Director of Public Prosecutions, waiting for court, court professionals, court context and the CJS. Fifteen scales were developed by conducting principal component analyses. Children gave negative ratings on nine of these, and on seven children, parents and professionals differed in their perceptions of how children experienced the CJS with mental health professionals viewing the impact of the CJS as more problematic than parents and children. Scores of children and parents on CJSQ scales correlated with indices of current psychological adjustment. These results point to the importance of making the Irish CJS more child‐friendly and for evaluating these reforms with the CJSQ. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Proximate Population Factors and Deforestation in Tropical Agricultural Frontiers

Forest conversion for agriculture expansion is the most salient signature of human occupation of the earth's land surface. Although population growth and deforestation are significantly associated at the global and regional scales, evidence for population links to deforestation at micro-scales—where people are actually clearing forests—is scant. Much of the planet's forest elimination is proceeding along tropical agricultural frontiers. This article examines the evolution of thought on population–environment theories relevant to deforestation in tropical agricultural frontiers. Four primary ways by which population dynamics interact with frontier forest conversion are examined: population density, fertility, and household demographic composition, and in-migration.     

Planning ambulatory health care delivery systems

This paper develops an optimal ambulatory health care delivery system for a community, by determining the optimal number, size and location of health centers. The demand for ambulatory health care services is given. The objective is to maximize the difference between the benefits of the patients receiving treatment and the total cost of the system. Utilization of facilities, which is a function of distance, is expressed in terms of benefits and incorporated into the cost-benefit analysis. The model is illustrated by a numerical example.     

Gray Markets,A Product of Demand Uncertainty and Excess Inventory

Diverting large quantities of goods from authorized distribution channels to unauthorized or “gray market” channels, albeit legal, significantly affects both firms and consumers due to effects on price, revenue, service and warranty availability, and product availability. In this paper we consider mechanisms by which the uncertainty surrounding inventory ordering decisions drives gray markets. We start with a minimal stochastic supply chain model composed of a producer and a retailer; then we restructure the model to add a distributor whereby the distributor and authorized retailer have the option of diverting inventory to a gray market. Our analysis sheds light on three issues: impacts of diversion on the various supply chain participants, strategies producers could use to combat or exploit gray markets, and important considerations for authorized retailers trying to set optimal order quantities in the presence of a gray market. Our analysis yields new insights into the behavior and impact of gray markets, which can inform management strategies and policies for confronting them.     

Concordance of Carcinogenic Response between Rodent Species: Potency Dependence and Potential Underestimation

The use of average qualitative concordance between two bioassay endpoints is considered, with emphasis directed at agreement between rats and mice from results of long-term carcinogenicity studies. It is noted that concordance varies as a function of the underlying potency or toxicity of the chemicals over which the averaging is performed. Thus, the averaging process dilutes large observed concordances from potent chemicals, and possibly inflates lower observed concordances from weakly active chemicals. Stratification over some measure of potency is suggested as a method for taking these effects into account. Statistical simulations of concordance analyses limited to low-potency ranges are employed to examine the concordance measure in greater detail. It is seen that at low potencies, observed concordance is consistently underestimated, reaching maximum levels of only about 80%.