Adaptation to Retirement: Role Changes and Psychological Resources

In this review, the influence of social and work roles are incorporated into a model of retirement adjustment, along with two psychological moderators that may aid the retirement transition. These psychological resources, locus of control and retirement self-efficacy, are those behavioral predispositions that would lead one to engage in proactive strategies for mastering the role changes inherent in the retirement transition. The implications of social and work-related role changes and psychological resources for retirement planning and adjustment are discussed.     

FORECASTING U.S. MORTALITY:

This article compares two methodologies for modeling and forecasting statistical time series models of demographic processes: Box-Jenkins ARIMA and structural time series analysis. The Lee-Carter method is used to construct nonlinear demographic models of U.S. mortality rates for the total population, gender, and race and gender combined. Single time varying parameters of k, the index of mortality, are derived from these model and fitted and forecasted using the two methodologies. Forecasts of life expectancy at birth, e₀, are generated from these indexes of k. Results show marginal differences in fit and forecasts between the two statistical approaches with a slight advantage to structural models. Stability across models for both methodologies offers support for the robustness of this approach to demographic forecasting.     

Rural Community Satisfaction and Attachment in Mass Consumer Society1

Abstract Previous models of community satisfaction and attachment have not included personal economic attitudes and behaviors as independent variables. Their inclusion is theoretically justified when residents of communities are viewed as consumers in a larger social/economic context first and residents of a particular community second. As locally-oriented economic processes—once part of the community experience—were removed to nonlocal markets, local economic and demographic attributes became less important to rural residents' experience of community. In two rural communities with extreme scores on a service center viability index, satisfaction with employment and location of employment are important predictors.     

The 1960s Black Riots Revisited: City Level Explanations of Their Severity

This paper involves a city-level investigation of the 1964–1971 black rioting. It attempts to explain inter-city variations in the severity of the rioting with inter-city variations in black population size, political structure, black-white income inequality, and regional location. The research charts two new areas of inquiry: (1) It is the first study to use data on the entire rioting period (1964–71). (2) Most previous investigators have concentrated on linear hypotheses, e.g., most have posited and tested for a linear relationship between riot activity and black-white economic inequality. However, a review of theoretic commentary on rebellion reveals that some potential relationships should be hypothesized as curvilinear; more specifically, plausible hypotheses can be developed that rebellious activity is highest where economic inequality and political responsiveness are moderate. Such hypotheses are developed and tested. The overall pattern of results supported the posited curvilinear relationships.     

Using the Biological Two-Stage Model to Assess Risk from Short-Term Exposures

Two assumptions used in risk assessment are investigated: (1) the assumption of fraction of lifetime dose rate assumes that the risk from a fractional lifetime exposure at a given dose rate is equal to the risk from full lifetime exposure at that same fraction of the given dose rate; (2) the assumption of fraction of lifetime risk assumes that the risk from a fractional lifetime exposure at a given dose rate is equal to that same fraction of the risk from full lifetime exposure at the same dose rate. These two assumptions are equivalent when risk is a linear function of dose. Thus both can be thought of as generalizations of the assumption that cancer risk is proportional to the total accumulated lifetime dose (or average daily dose), which is often made to assess the risk from short-term exposures. In this paper, the age-specific cumulative hazard functions are derived using the two-stage model developed by Moolgavkar, Venzon, and Knudson for situations when the exposure occurs during a single period or a single instant. The two assumptions described above are examined for three types of carcinogens, initiator, completer, and promoter, in the context of the model. For initiator and completer, these two assumptions are equivalent in the low-dose region; for a promoter, using the fraction of lifetime risk assumption is generally more conservative than that of the fraction of lifetime dose rate assumption. Tables are constructed to show that the use of either the fraction of lifetime dose rate assumption or the fraction lifetime risk assumption can both underestimate and overestimate the true risk for the three types of carcinogens.     

Estimation and Extrapolation of Tumor Probabilities from a Mouse Bioassay with Survival/Sacrifice Components

A nonparametric estimator of the probability distribution of time-to-tumor is incorporated into an algorithm for calculating linearly extrapolated dosage limits from an animal carcino-genesis bioassay. The procedure is illustrated with tumor data from a mouse bioassay with 2-acetylaminofluorene. Extrapolated dosage limits for an excess risk of 10^-6 differ by only a factor of 2 across the six replicates of the experiment.