DO NEWLY RETIRED WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES HAVE SUFFICIENT RESOURCES TO MAINTAIN WELL‐BEING?

A current policy issue is the extent to which savings are sufficient to sustain economic well-being in retirement. We compare annuitized wealth at retirement to three preretirement consumption estimates. About one-half of new retirees have insufficient resources to enable the full maintenance of estimated preretirement consumption in retirement, and about 40% fail to meet the "0.7 of earnings" standard that is used in many studies. Using standards reflecting social (poverty) norms we find a less serious problem. About 5% (25%) of new retirees have insufficient resources to enable an above-poverty (near-poverty) level of living during retirement. (JEL J14, J26 )     

Researching others: epistemology,experience, standpoints and participation

This paper discusses a longitudinal, interview-based study of Australian secondary school students that explores the interaction between school ethos and forms of subjectivity. The study was designed to enable prospective and retrospective understandings of identity over time. It is suggested that this methodology encourages a reflexive self-positioning for both participants and researchers and, in the accumulation of an archive of perspectives, responds to poststructuralist critiques of contingency and construction in research interviews. Second, it is argued that the richness of longitudinal research invites more than one kind of analysis, and that working with and across conventionally divergent theoretical approaches can be fruitful. This is discussed with reference to Bourdieu's account of social field and habitus, and Hollway and Jefferson's notion of the 'defended subject'.     

Behavioural Social Work with Schizophrenic Patients in the Community

Summary A preliminary project on the application of behaviour modificationprocedures in the home setting is reported together with commentson the social needs of schizophrenic patients and their families.The article includes suggestions about social work with thisclient group based on the project experience.     

SIMULTANEOUS DETERMINATION OF CHURCH CONTRIBUTIONS AND CHURCH ATTENDANCE

In a standard model of household allocation of time and income, church attendance and church contributions are determined simultaneously. There are life-cycle aspects to both attendance and contributions, as Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975) and Ehrenberg (1977) have argued, and contributions behavior is affected by tax treatment and by a potential free-rider problem as well. This paper motivates an econometric specification which recognizes these features and estimates the parameters with a data set of over 2000 Protestant church members.     

New directions in child care

SUMMARY. This article examines through examples of child care services the gaps between research findings, child care policies and good practice. Links are made between research studies and Parliamentary enquiries, and the White Paper on Child Care law, concerning Children's Homes, fostering, education and health in care and leaving care The writer proposes that agencies should consider setting up internal means of keeping up to date with and disseminating research into policy and practice, and monitoring performance in relation to research findings, guidelines, legal requirements and inspectorial findings, Linked with internal training and staff development the article concludes that quality services might thus he more readily achieved than at present This article is based on a presentation to the joint Association of Metropolitan Authorities/Association of County Councils/National Children's bureau Child Care Conference on 26 January 1988     

Toward a Dialogical Perspective on Agency

The aim of this article is to motivate and outline a dialogical perspective on agency that accommodates centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in current cultural theories of agency. To complement approaches that assume a high degree of integration and clarity, we emphasise the diversity of agency as it is experienced in the open-ended dialogical relationship with a particular other. While these former approaches to agency provide us with the means to examine the influence of social processes such as division of labour and reproduction of community, they tend to underplay the importance of agency as it is embodied and experienced in the lives of particular people. To reflect on this aspect of agency, we will draw extensively on Bakhtin's work, which crosses boundaries between philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and which is concerned to understand what is personal in activity. In terms of agency, his work draws our attention to the sense of responsibility and potentiality that imbues our dialogues with particular others, the aesthetics and ethics involved in dialoguing with the other, and the sense of dilemmatic choice and intonation that is involved in our dialogue with the other.     

THE EFFECTS OF THE RACE OF THE INTERVIEWER ON RACE-RELATED ATTITUDES OF BLACK RESPONDENTS IN SRC/CPS NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES

Previous research found substantial effects of the race of theinterviewer on measures of civic attitudes and electoral participationof blacks in NES surveys from 1964, 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1984.This study extends the previous analysis in two ways: it usesdata from two additional NES surveys, 1982 and 1986; and itfocuses on the effects of the race of the interviewer on race-relatedattitudes. Blacks interviewed by whites were much more likelyto express warmth and closeness toward whites than were blacksinterviewed by blacks. But whereas there is no race-of-interviewereffect on blacks' expressions of warmth toward blacks, thereis a clear race-of-interviewer effect on blacks' expressionsof closeness toward blacks. The pattern of responses to thecloseness items appears to result from the format of the question.The observed trend of decreasing expressed closeness of blackstoward blacks in NES surveys between 1976 and 1984 is an artifactof changes in the racial composition of the interviewer staff.