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Social capital bas been a key framework in conceptualizing the place of social ties in quality of life. Families have not been among groups of interest in social capital research. Yet within the context of research and public policy on aging, the contemporary discourse on families and care is congruent with social capital assumptions. In this paper, we draw on social capital literature to frame our understanding of the social capital inherent in families of frail older adults, and hypothesize their abilities to benefit family members. Data are drawn from Statistics Canada 2002 General Social Survey on Aging and Social Support. Le capital social a constitue un cadre important pour la conceptualisation de la place des liens sociaux dans la qualite de vie. La famille n'a pas fait partie des groupes d'interets dans les recherches sur le capital social. Neanmoins, dans le contexte de la recherche et de la politique publique sur le vieillissement, le discours contemporain sur les familles et sur les soins est congruent avec les hypotheses sur le capital social. Les auteurs s'inspirent de la documentation sur le capital social pour encadrer leur comprehension du capital social inherent aux familles ayant des personnes agees de sante fragile. Ils emettent l'hypothese de leur capacite de beneficier des soins des membres de la famille. Les donnees proviennent de l'Enquete sociale generale sur le vieillissement et le soutien social (ESG 2002) de Statistique Canada., SOCIAL CAPITAL HAS BEEN A KEY framework in conceptualizing the place of social ties in quality of life. The foundational work of scholars like Putnam (1995), Bourdieu (1986), and Coleman [...]

The authors examined time spent on paid and unpaid work across the life course and historically to reflect on connections between activity patterns and macroeconomic events. The authors conducted quasi-cohort analysis on time-use data over 30 years to examine trends in paid and unpaid work. Women aged 40 years and older spent more time on paid work and less time on unpaid work between 1971 and 1998. Men's paid work time decreased between 1971 and 1981 and between 1992 and 1998 but increased between 1981 and 1992, paralleling economic cycles. Paid work declined in later life, both in cross-sections and within birth cohorts, for men and women, and it declined more rapidly with each successive survey year. Unpaid work peaked around the usual retirement age for men and women in all birth cohorts. Retired seniors remained engaged in productive activities into later life, making a partial substitution of one form of productive engagement for another. Keywords: paid and unpaid work; age; cohort; gender

A current emphasis in Canadian public policy is on community care for frail seniors. Such care is viewed as attractive in part because public costs are lower than for traditional nursing home care. Adult Family Living (AFL) is seen as an exemplar of this community focus. Data from a multi-model evaluation of residential continuing care in western Canada are used to show that while AFL programs have lower public costs than nursing homes, AFL caregivers incur high levels of economic and non-economic costs. We address the question of the sustainability of this approach to community-based residential care in light of the apparent transfer of public costs to AFL caregivers. KEYWORDS. Public policy, residential continuing care, adult family living, costs

It is frequently claimed that experiments can attest to causal assertions, whereas cross-sectional survey research cannot underwrite similar causal claims. Some logical deficiencies with deriving causal claims from correlation data have been addressed through model testing, the estimation of reciprocal effects, and admonitions to seek sparse models, but the foundations for making specifically causal structural equation modeling claims remain elusive. The body of work collected in Pearl's (2000) book, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, makes substantial progress toward elucidating a logical structure capable of distinguishing evidence-supported causal claims from unsupported SEM causal claims. Pearl's approach is sufficiently laden with notation, definitions, axioms, and theorems that most SEM users are likely to respond to by saying, "just looking, thanks." Our objective in this article is to provide a relatively accessible entry into Pearl's thinking because we feel this work is worth more than a cursory glance. We tackle one fundamental component of Pearl's conceptualization, something he calls d-separation. Our hope is that once SEM practitioners begin to see the structure of Pearl's thinking, they will strive to discover more of Pearl's pearls of wisdom. Pearl does not attempt to defend an entire structural equation model, but instead seeks to determine which specific effect coefficients within a model do, and which do not, garner causal support through demonstration of consistency with the data. This article explains how d-separation connects to control variables, partial correlations, causal structuring, and even to a potential mistake in regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual and societal perceptions of food-related health risks are multidimensional and complex. Social, political, psychological, and economic factors interact with technological factors and affect perceptions in complex ways. Previous research found that the significant determinants of risk perceptions include socioeconomic and behavioral variables. Most of these past results are based on two-way comparisons and factor analysis. The objective of this study was to analyze the significance of socioeconomic determinants of risk perceptions concerning health and food safety. A multivariate approach was used and the results were compared with earlier bivariate results to determine which socioeconomic predictors were robust across methods. There were two major findings in this study. The first was that the results in the multivariate models were generally consistent with earlier bivariate analysis. That is, variables such as household income, number of children, gender, age, and voting preferences were strong predictors of an individual?s risk perceptions. The second result was that the gender of the respondent was the only variable found to be robust across all three classes of health and food safety issues across two time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]