Senior centers in the era of the “Third Age:” Country clubs, community centers, or something else?

This study explored how senior center employees conceptualize their work and organizational mission. Unstructured interviews with multiple service providers (N = 32) and participant observation in one center reveal a growing emphasis on selling individualized lifestyles to young, healthy, and active seniors, as opposed to a more communal, intergenerational approach. In interviews, service providers talked about “community” in vague and ambiguous terms. At the same time, the philosophy of some providers was informed by a well-developed discourse of individual choice. In discussing needed resources and future goals, service providers spoke to the difficulty of appealing to different cohorts of seniors, but focused primarily on the needs of young seniors and expressed a desire to combat the “image problem” of senior centers. These trends have potentially negative implications for intergenerational community and the developmental passages of seniors. Nevertheless, centers offer many opportunities for seniors to forge connections and bridge differences, and the study concludes with some suggestions for building on these existing resources.     

Sexual Orientation Discrimination and Its Challenges for Nonprofit Managers

In the wake of the recent New Jersey Supreme Court decision, Dale v. Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council Boy Scouts (1999), this article examines the issue of sexual orientation discrimination and the challenges it presents nonprofit managers. Because of regional shifts in public opinion, the enactment of nondiscrimination laws at the state and local level, and now a state Supreme Court interpreting state law to include the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) as a “public accommodation,” nonprofit managers may face a more complex legal and moral environment. It is hoped that this article will challenge nonprofit managers to carefully reexamine their membership and personnel policies with respect to lesbians and gay men and begin preparing their organizations for this cultural change.     

比较历史学视野中的《百苗图》

清朝所绘制的《百苗图》是近代中国早期的民族志。将《百苗图》与日本及奥斯曼帝国所绘制的图绘进行对比,以一个比较历史学的视角来看待这些处于扩张时期的几个帝国,从而指出对他者的民族志兴趣并非欧洲所独有,而是普遍地存在于全世界的帝国体系之中。     

Boundary-Spanning Demands,Personal Mastery,and Family Satisfaction: Individual and Crossover Effects Among Dual-Earner Parents

Grounded in ecological systems theory, this study modeled family satisfaction as a function of family-unfriendly work culture, work–family blurring, and personal mastery, examining both individual crossover effects. Analysis of data from 273 married dual-earner parents revealed that family-unfriendly work culture was negatively related to family satisfaction, whereas personal mastery was positively related to family satisfaction. Mothers' family-unfriendly work culture and work–family blurring were negatively related to their husbands' family satisfaction, but no parallel crossover findings were obtained for fathers, suggesting gender differences in crossover. Results were consistent with the notion that family life can be compromised by work cultures that create demands spanning both work and family domains. Implications for the management of work and family boundaries are discussed.     

A note on nursing practices in an American isolate with a high birth rate

Abstract An unusually short interval between successive births in a non-contracepting and breast-feeding population has been reported by Dr. Mindel C. Sheps (Pop. Studies, 19, 1). Nursing practices that might affect the interval between birth and pregnancy are reported here from systematic observations made in the field. Probable factors are: (1) a maternal diet high in calories and in protein; (2) although infants are nursed for many months, each nursing period is short in a busy and highly patterned community schedule; and (3) supplementary feeding is introduced at an early age.     

Detecting the scales at which birds respond to structure in urban landscapes

Little empirical information exists about how birds respond to urban landscape structure across multiple scales. We explored how the variation in percent tree canopy cover, at four different scales, affected the abundance of bird species across various urban sites in North America. Bird counts were derived from previous studies, and tree patches were measured from aerial photographs that represented areas of 0.2 km², 1.5 km², 25.0 km², and 85.0 km². At each of the four areas, we conducted regressions between bird counts and percent cover of various tree patch sizes. From these analyses, we determined the area (called the best prediction area—BPA) and the patch size (called the best patch size—BPS) that accounted for a significant amount of the variation in bird counts, beyond the variation accounted for by these parameters measured at other scales. BPA and BPS were calculated primarily to take into account the high degree of collinearity that existed among the amount of tree canopy cover measured across the four scales.We calculated BPA and BPS values for a variety of bird species and ascertained whether larger species had relatively larger BPS and BPA values. In the spring, middle-sized to large birds (16.6 g–184.0 g) had relatively larger BPS values than did smaller birds (3.2 g–16.5 g), but in the summer, the largest birds (61.7 g–576.0 g) had small BPS values. Spring BPA values showed a similar result but summer BPA values did not. A majority of birds of all sizes had summer BPA values at the finer scales of 0.2 km² and 1.5 km². Overall, body size was an approximate predictor of the area and patch size at which a species responds to trees in a landscape, but many exceptions did occur. These exceptions could be related to a variety of factors, one being the difficulty in relating human-biased measurements to avian measurements of a landscape. The method described in this study will help researchers design multi-scale studies to address the effect of landscape pattern on different animal species.