Poverty and disability in Eastern and Western Cape Provinces,South Africa

The impact of disability on the living conditions of people living in specifically resource‐poor areas in South Africa has not previously been addressed. This paper presents a comparison of people with a disability and their non‐disabled peers with respect to some key poverty indicators among a sample of Xhosa speaking individuals in resource‐poor areas of Eastern and Western Cape Provinces. A questionnaire on the level of living conditions (household composition and socio‐economic characteristics) and a detailed disability questionnaire that captured more specific details of the disability experience of the individual with a disability were adapted to the South African context and utilised. Despite the improved situation of households with a disabled family member in terms of financial resources (due primarily to the allocation of disability grants), other measures of poverty (education and employment) remain divisive for those with disabilities.     

Coping With Ethnic Stereotypes in the Academic Domain: Perceived Injustice and Psychological Disengagement

Psychological disengagement is the defensive detachment of self-esteem from a particular domain. In the academic arena, disengagement can result from devaluing academic success or discounting the validity of academic outcomes. We review evidence for ethnic differences in these two processes of psychological disengagement and present results of a multiethnic study examining perceived ethnic injustice and academic performance as predictors of devaluing and discounting. Among African American students, beliefs about ethnic injustice (but not academic performance) predicted greater discounting and devaluing. Among European American students, poor academic performance (but not beliefs about ethnic injustice) predicted greater devaluing and discounting. Among Latino/a students, beliefs about ethnic injustice were associated with greater discounting, whereas poorer academic performance was associated with increased devaluing.     

Gender and Health Inequalities: What Are They and What Can We Do About Them?

The subject of gender and health inequalities is contested territory in health policy, research and practice. Yet there is a dominant approach which I describe as a form of technocratic rationality. Its application imposes significant limitations because it represents the problem of gender and health in terms of measurable sex differences in relation to health service access and health outcomes. In doing so, it fails to address and explain the social dynamics that generate the problem. I propose an alternative approach that originates in Australian women's health policies of the 1980s. These emphasised the inequalities between men's and women's participation in mainstream health policy, planning, management and delivery of services, and women's concomitant marginalisation. Recent sociological study offers support for this perspective suggesting that the endogenous organisational dynamics (or logics) within public health institutions provide a better way of understanding what the problem of gender inequalities in health is, and how we might fix it.     

The Importance of Source and Credibility Perception in Times of Crisis: Crisis Communication in a Socially Mediated Era

Social media are invaluable sources of information during organizational crises. Although recent research confirms this fundamental role in crisis communication, this article is aimed at deepening the understanding about the role of the source of information in this socially mediated era by comparing the organization and the employee as communicators. As social media lack traditional gatekeeping processes, dynamics of both source and content credibility are assessed. The findings, based on an experimental design, advocate that judgments of organizational reputation are not only dependent on the crisis-response strategy, but also depend on the source and perceptions of source and content credibility.     

Dementia Caregiving in the Context of Late‐Life Remarriage: Support Networks,Relationship Quality,and Well‐being

Caregiving research has not accounted for increasingly diverse and complex marital and family histories of older Americans. The authors examined social relations and care‐specific positive and negative support networks among late‐life remarried wife dementia caregivers (N = 61) to determine associations among network structure, relationship quality with and support received from network members, and global assessments of family and stepfamily disagreement on caregiver well‐being. Own family and friends predominated in the social relations and positive networks. Although over half (54%) of respondents included a stepfamily member in their positive networks, stepchildren comprised the largest group (35%) in the negative networks. Larger negative networks and actively negative interactions were related to greater caregiver burden, and more global disagreement with stepfamily was associated with greater depression and burden. The findings illustrate the complex nature of support and the value of targeted examinations of caregiving support dynamics among late‐life remarried older adults and stepfamilies facing health demands.     

Biological and social determinants of body size across the life span

The accuracy of demographic models designed to project future trends of population-level health and disease can be improved by incorporating biological data. One barrier to this process are quantitative characteristics of the data themselves. Biological data are characteristically time-dependent phenomena that behave in a nonlinear fashion. To develop accurate projections of the morbidity, disability, and mortality experience among future cohorts in late life, research needs to focus on development of models that create the opportunity to distinguish all-or-none, boundaries, and latency aspects of biological factors driving demographic phenomena, development of methods to identify time-dependent effects, and development of genetically informative samples. This presentation focuses on the biology of adult body size, its behavior as a variable in statistical analyses, and strategies for the incorporation of this variable into demographic models of population aging in the United States. First, several examples of generally observed quantitative characteristics of biological variables are reviewed. To illustrate the nonlinear character of biological data, three general patterns of change with aging are presented. Next, issues concerning the measurement of body size are discussed. Scenarios describing body size over the adult life span are described. By the end of this process, recommendations for starting a dialogue between researchers interested in biological endpoints (individual weight change, disease risk) and those interested in demographic outcomes (population-level disease and disability issues) using body size will be presented.     

Macroeconomic Implications of Agglomeration

Cities exist because of the productivity gains that arise from clustering production and workers, a process called agglomeration. How important is agglomeration for aggregate growth? This paper constructs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on aggregate growth. We combine aggregate time‐series and city‐level panel data to estimate the model's parameters via generalized method of moments. The estimates imply a statistically and economically significant impact of local agglomeration on the growth rate of per capita consumption, raising it by about 10%.     

Intergenerational Relations: Theory, Research, and Policy

The dramatic increase in life expectancy and lowered fertility, especially in more advantaged countries, has resulted in people living longer and in more complex family structures. Other important changes affecting the family include greater geographical mobility, increased racial and ethnic diversity, new patterns of immigration and identity reformulation, as well as changing work and family roles. With reduced governmental resources available, it is especially important to understand the changing nature of multigenerational family structures, functioning, and roles in individual well-being in order to maximize the effectiveness of informal and formal supports available to those in need. This special issue addresses basic factors related to multigeneration support systems that will be needed to anticipate, understand, and design support programs to cope with the challenges facing individuals in all generation positions, families, and communities in the United States and around the world.     

Patterns of Cocaine Use in Australia, 1985–88

Cocaine has been seen as a potential social and health threat to Australia, a role it already occupies in the United States. However, the results of two national population surveys, collected in 1985 and 1988, cast doubt on this interpretation. Contrary to popular perception, they show that the proportion who report having tried cocaine has declined, not increased. There has also been a decline in the proportion who say that they would try cocaine if it was offered by a friend. While some groups are at higher risk from cocaine in 1988 than in 1985, notably women aged in their late twenties and thirties, the overall pattern is of a decline in the high risk categories. Moreover, cocaine remains a drug of the better-educated young in Australia, not the under-privileged, as in the United States. Some tentative explanations for why cocaine has not become more popular, focusing on its image, Australia's social structure, and availability and cost factors associated with cocaine, are discussed.