Ability, disability, and the oldest old

A measure of range of ability is used to profile the 85-years-old-and-older (oldest old) population, including the highly disabled institutional population. This new measure uses two new questions available in the 1990 Decennial Census concerning a self-care limitation and a mobility limitation as well as the usual question concerning a work limitation. In addition to examining the extent of disability among the oldest old, the article examines the extent of care potentially available in the household as well as the economic characteristics of this age group. It is also profiled in terms of relevant personal characteristics, including age, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity, rural residence, education, and employment. A key question addressed is the need for help or care among the oldest old and how various long-term care proposals would meet such needs. A careful analysis of this unique and growing population is necessary to both allay fears of the cost of care or help as well as to dispel stereotypes of this age group as frail and dependent, and in need of institutional care.     

Worldviews or Social Groups as the Source of Moral Value Attitudes: Implications for the Culture Wars Thesis

Individual moral value attitudes are typically explained by reference to social experiences as indicated by social group variables. Contrary to this view, the emergent culture wars perspective claims that two worldviews that transcend social groups are ultimately and fundamentally responsible for moral value attitudes. Although this relationship has been claimed for the general population, it has not been investigated with national representative data. This paper contrasts the worldview and social group explanations by examining the relative importance of the worldviews implicated in the culture wars literature and the social groups found to be important in previous research. I find social groups to be more important than worldviews, but that worldviews also have explanatory power. I conclude with a discussion about possible clarifications of the culture wars thesis.     

Evaluation design for a community prevention trial. An environmental approach to reduce alcohol-involved trauma

The Community Prevention Trial was 5-year effort to reduce alcohol-involved injuries and death through a comprehensive program of community awareness and policy activities. The three experimental communities were of approximately 100,000 population each (one in Northern California, one in Southern California, and one in South Carolina). Matched comparison communities were used for each experimental community. This article describes the evaluation approach used in a program that sought to change environmental factors not a specific population or target group. This approach demanded unique evaluation approaches for determining overall community aggregate effects, that is, distal outcomes, as well as changes in key mediating variables, that is, process effects. The problem of trending and lagged effects of community prevention programs are discussed.     

Summing up. Recommendations and experiences for evaluation of community-level prevention programs

This article provides recommendations and observations about evaluation of a locally based prevention project to reduce problems at a total community or aggregate level. The shift from targeting specific individuals or subpopulations to the overall structure and environment of a community is most demanding. Evaluation tools and analysis techniques have lagged behind program development because community-level interventions are not linked to a specific target group who can be separately studied. Thus assumptions about using random assignment and/or comparison communities as means to control for confounding variables are weakened when the unit of analysis is the community itself and dependent measures are subject to trending and the effects of history.     

Clinical supervision: Its role in “Containing” countertransference responses to a filicidal patient

This paper illustrates the role of supervision in processing countertransference responses with might have disrupted the therapist's empathy with a patient who had killed her child. The clinical material demonstrates how the therapist's responses of initial denial and subsequent disgust and fear were dealt with in supervision. As a result, the treatment process led to genuine, albeit limited, therapeutic change in a patient with severe character pathology.This paper is developed from a presentation of the case of Mrs. Jay at Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, on May 2, 1989.     

Net worth and the economic diversity of the elderly

Using data from the 1984 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this article examines characteristics of the older population disaggregated by net-worth quintiles. The authors argue that income is not a sufficient measure of economic status for current policy discussions on issues such as changing Medicare co-payments, increasing the taxation of social security benefits, or means-testing under Medicaid. Net worth is a better measure of economic status, particularly for the elderly, because it represents the net value of assets accumulated over the life course. Their results indicate that there is considerable diversity in the economic status of the older population, which is masked by aggregate statistics (such as means and medians) typically used to summarize the economic status of population groups. Stereotypical views of the elderly based on such aggregates result in misdirected policy formulation. In the future, policymakers will need to formulate policies and programs using information on the distributions of income and assets among the older populations rather than relying on statistical aggregates.     

The NTEE classification system: tests of reliability/validity in the field of higher education

An analysis of the field of higher education reveals a surprisingly large number of classification errors within the (US) National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities database. Of the nearly 4,000 non-profit entities coded within the universe of institutions of higher education, we estimate that approximately 60 per cent were incorrectly included (Type II errors). Institutions incorrectly excluded from the higher education universe (Type I errors) represent roughly 10 per cent of the institutions coded correctly. These errors result primarily from assigning codes on the basis of the names of organisations (for example, College Park Towers is classified as a college, when it is in fact a housing complex for senior citizens) and from trying too hard to assign codes in ambiguous situations. The consequences can be significant for the users of these data, and we recommend raising bright warning flags while simultaneously enlisting the help of the entire non-profit sector in improving the classification coding process.The authors are with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to our colleagues on the staff of the Foundation, we wish to thank Helmut Anheier, Ted Bozovich, Harvey Dale, Virginia Hodgkinson, Stephen Noga and Christopher Toppe for helpful suggestions.