UMBC will host a 2 day “Pre-Spring Break Dissertation House” on Friday, March 11 and Saturday, March 12, 2011.   Breakfast, lunch, and a snack will be served daily. This Dissertation House session will be held in lieu of the annual Dissertation House and Community Building Retreats at Coolfont and Rocky Gap.

Location: UMBC Commons, Room 331 (changed from 327 (Friday)), Room 329 (Saturday). Time: 9:00 AM Sharp – 5:00 PM on both Friday and Saturday

All interested participants must follow the guidelines for the application: http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/apply/

Application period: Monday, February 21, 2011 – Friday, March 4, 2011.

Contact:
Dinah Winnick
Communications Manager
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
410-455-8117
dwinnick@umbc.edu

Faculty of UMBC’s Center for Aging Studies, affiliated with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, have received several large grants from the National Institute on Aging to support groundbreaking research in recent months, including three beginning this semester.

“Autonomy in Assisted Living: A Cultural Analysis,” led by PIs Ann Christine Frankowski and Robert L. Rubinstein, is a four-year grant to study autonomy in six diverse assisted living settings, which provide residential and functional assistance to primarily older adults through a person-centered, consumer-oriented, social model of care. Researchers have demonstrated that older adults’ sense of autonomy – expressed as independence, choice or control – is integral to their health and well-being. The research team will examine how autonomy, a core American value and a key component of assisted living philosophy, is defined, experienced and negotiated by assisted living residents. This ethnographic research will inform policy and practice on how assisted living can provide an environment resulting in a better quality of life and care for the increasing number of adults living longer and moving into senior housing.

“Generativity in the Lives of Older Women” (GLOW) is a four-year project led by PI Robert L. Rubinstein and co-PI Kate de Medeiros aimed at better understanding how older women without children invest themselves in future generations. People often wrongly assume older women are mothers and/or grandmothers. In reality, approximately 20% of people 65 and over in the U.S. were “childless” in 2011—a figure that is expected to grow to 30% in 2030. GLOW researchers will interview 200 women to explore their views on the meaning that not having children has had in their lives; talk about ways they have influenced future generations through volunteerism, teaching, passing along personal objects and other creative activities; and discuss their plans for managing future health care needs, which might include family caregiving. This study will allow us to learn more about an important yet often overlooked population with an eye to helping service organizations and policymakers rethink assumptions about family structure in older age. GLOW is accompanied by a supplemental grant focusing on older Russian women who immigrated to the U.S. after the fall of communism.

Department chair J. Kevin Eckert and co-PI Brandy Harris-Wallace received a Research Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research for “Stigma and the Multicultural Workforce.” This project will focus on cultural differences among direct care workers, their experiences of stigma and their own stigmatizing attitudes and behavior toward others in assisted living settings. The researchers will develop and pilot a survey instrument to measure these experiences, attitudes and behaviors, which could be used in the future to identify actual and potential conflict areas and develop training programs to address stigma in direct care work.

A whale of a tale. Citing harassment by activists, Japanese call off whaling season early.

Where we’re going we don’t need internet? Rural America is only 60% connected to high speed internet.

Thanks to Calculated Risk

Quick question: What’s your job?

It’s a quick question… and a Big question.

Your job takes up a massive portion of your waking hours and supplies you the income to survive.

So… if you don’t have a job… you’ve got a serious problem (and a lot of time) on your hands.

Right now there are millions of Americans without jobs and recent reports suggest this will not change soon.

The blog Calculated Risk notes the average number unemployed has been at

above 400,000 all year after falling sharply during the last few months of 2010.

What comes up must come down, right? Maybe not, some economists fear.

Recently Justin Weidner and John Williams, of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggested that the natural unemployment rate (i.e. long term level) may have increased from the past rate of 5.0% and that

with a 6.7% natural rate, current and fore-casted levels of unemployment imply that significant labor market slack will persist for several years.

Over at Free Exchange, R.A. things that this study is by no means conclusive but it does

suggest that there has been some rise in the long-term structural rate of unemployment.  …the warning in these papers that labour market weakness will persist for some time is not encouraging; the longer workers go without jobs, the less employable they become.

Hey, at least employers don’t discriminate against the unemployed. Wait they do? Well, it can’t get any worse right?