To stay or to go? Postretirement housing choices of single Baby Boomer women

Single women of the Baby Boomer generation are often financially disadvantaged in the retirement planning process due to their lower accumulated savings compared to male retirees. This disadvantage impacts significant consumption decisions such as postretirement housing choices. This study uses the theory of planned behavior to examine how certainty in intentions influences preparing and planning for postretirement housing. A typology of single Baby Boomer women is developed based on their financial, demographic, and psychological circumstances. Each segment likely requires different informational strategies and financial services to foster proactive planning for retirement. Significant implications exist for social policy and the financial services sector.     

Kontexteffekte in Familien – Angleichung von Paaren und intergenerationale Transmission am Beispiel Religiosität

The present contribution shows conceptual and methodological approaches for the study of social context effects within families. Family members mutually constitute the social context in which family behavior and personality development take place. Social influence in families becomes evident empirically in family members’ significant similarity concerning a wide variety of characteristics. The present study focuses on intrafamily convergence with regard to religiousness. In an empirical illustration, both (a) horizontal intracouple alignment and (b) vertical intergenerational transmission processes are examined. Besides the finding that experiences during religious socialization in the parental home have a stronger impact than partner influences in adulthood, our analyses show that social context effects are more pronounced the stronger the cohesion of the respective interaction dyad is (e.g., according to measures of relationship quality).     

Bridging and Bonding in the Academic Melting Pot: Cultural Resources and Network Diversity

Understanding how cultural resources shape the formation of social networks is a methodological challenge as well as a theoretical objective, and both are yet to be met. In this study, sociability on college campuses is modeled as a process in which students’ prior cultural experiences and the current social structure of the student body work together, affecting the likelihood of friendships that take place within or across racial boundaries. Structural and cultural perspectives are surveyed to develop hypotheses concerning the determinants of interracial friendship, and these hypotheses are tested against a sample of 3,392 students from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen. The results suggest that religiosity, political activism, high arts participation, and athletic activities undertaken prior to college affect the diversity of social networks formed in the first year, but work in different directions. The effects of these cultural experiences may be explained by the racial organization of cultural activity on campus.     

Ergonomic risk assessment of nasogastric tube placement and implications for design and training

The placement of nasogastric (NG) tubes is known to be prone to error and may lead to serious issues for patient safety and wellbeing. In some instances these have been catastrophic and resulted in the death of the patient. This study sought to explore the potential risks associated with this procedure through the use of systematic prospective risk assessment. The research team used the Prospective Hazard Analysis (PHA) toolkit developed by Ward et al (2010) . The study has shown a wide number of risks that cover equipment design, work organisation, and training issues. The link between equipment design and training provides an important example of the need for a systematic approach to reducing errors and improving resilience in this aspect of healthcare.     

Using HIT to deliver integrated care for the frail elderly in the UK: current barriers and future challenges

In this paper we briefly describe the results of a 3 year project examining the use of Health Information Technologies (e.g., electronic patient record systems) to deliver integrated care. In particular, we focus on one group of patient (the frail elderly) and efforts to design an e-health supported healthcare pathway (the frail elderly pathway--FEP). The aim of FEP is to bring together clinicians and staff from health and social care and allow them to share patient information. Our findings show that progress in delivering a fully-supported and working FEP has been slow, not least because of the difficulties experienced by healthcare staff in using current IT systems. In addition, there are many strategic and technical issues which remain unresolved (e.g., systems interoperability).     

Improving wheelchair prescription: an analysis of user needs and existing tools

Wheelchair users experience many situations that affect the stability and associated performance of their wheelchair. Stability is affected by user characteristics and abilities, environmental features and conditions, and wheelchair modification and accessories. Wheelchair prescribers need effective tools and methods to provide quantitative evaluation and prediction of the behavior of the user-wheelchair system in a variety of static and dynamic situations. Such information is very important to guide efficient management of associated risks and adjust chairs accordingly. This project involves a user-centered approach for design and evaluation of a load cell based wheelchair stability assessment system (Wheel-SAS). Here, the current methods for assessing stability are described, and their shortcomings explained. The user-centered design approach being applied to the development of the associated Wheel-SAS hardware and software is described. Future work including semi-structured interviews and an online survey with wheelchair prescribers and associated healthcare professionals for deriving user requirements and a design specification for a load cell system for measuring dynamic wheelchair stability are detailed.     

Resiling From “Resilience”

This is a sketch for a critique of “resilience” and “resiliency” as keywords of neoliberal newspeak (officialese, langue de bois) under the innocuous banner of which all manner of business is now being transacted. I register the rapid extension of resilience discourse, note the socioeconomic context of its rise to prominence, and identify its implicit political assumptions and its social and subjective effects and side effects.