Being that military service was a normative part of early adult life for today’s older U.S. population, the number of veterans aged 60 and older in 2015 was estimated to be over 9.3 million. Older United States (U.S.) veterans are a population at risk for disability due to their early life experiences with military service…
Category: Aging
Ph.D. Spotlight: Weathering the Storm: An Examination of Fetal Loss, Maternal Age, and Norms of Race and Sexuality.
Dr. Latinsky’s dissertation tests if fetal loss can be applied as an extension of prior literature on the weathering hypothesis. To do so, this study extends upon the weathering hypothesis: the observation that black people experience substantially higher levels of stress than their white counterparts in the United States, that this gap only increases as…
Research Spotlight: How Does Advice to Women and Men Traveling Alone Reflect Gender Inequality?
Searching the internet has become almost a prerequisite for travel (though considerably fewer trips, of course, are happening during the pandemic). Online articles and blogs are appealing sources of information because they offer up-to-date travel advice, often drawn from personal experiences. Despite their widespread use, online travel articles have received surprisingly little research attention. Dr….
How to Fix the Nursing Home Crisis, Now and After the Pandemic
This piece first appeared in the Tampa Bay Times. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tens of thousands of deaths and more than three million infections, with predictions of many more to come. Nursing home residents have been among the most affected by the pandemic. In some states, half or more of all COVID deaths have…
Telemedicine Saved My Life
This piece first appeared in the Orlando Sentinel. Tragically, COVID-19 has already claimed the lives of over 2,000 Floridians. The virus is contagious and deadly, especially to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. But for me, the pandemic and the rules created to stop its spread created an odd confluence of events that likely…
Social Equity: The Predictable Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Minority Communities
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has demanded global attention as it claims the lives of more than 560,000 humans globally and more than 135,000 humans in the United States alone. COVID-19 death data in the United States by race, reveals a striking image of inequity. The data indicate that there are disproportionate deaths in Black and…
Aging Today: Why are older adults especially vulnerable to financial exploitation and how common is it?
The audio from these scripts originally aired during WFSU’s Aging Today segment. An early sign of cognitive impairment is difficulty managing money, making older people susceptible to scams or to financial abuse by family or friends. But even without cognitive impairment, the ability to judge trustworthiness can decline in later life, making older adults prey to false…
Aging Today: What is Lifelong Learning?
The script for this piece originally aired during WFSU’s Aging Today segment. We tend to think of education as something we do early in life to prepare us for employment, but programs to give educational opportunities to older adults, often referred to as lifelong learning, have a different goal. Rather than taking courses to gain employment credentials,…
Ph.D. Spotlight: Elyse Claxton on Feminine Body Ideals in Teen Girl and Women Fashion Magazines and Instagram
Dr. Claxton’s dissertation analyzes whether (and how) Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) diversify the kinds of images of women in fashion magazines. Media are important agents of socialization. Accordingly, media images reflect as well as inform what characteristics symbolize feminine beauty. In the field of female beauty and fashion magazines in the U.S., visual portrayals of…
Sharing the Love: Now is the Time for Pets to Keep Us Together
This was first published on Linkedin. What strange and unsettling times these are. In nearly every country, the new normal of self-isolation and social distancing is forcing us to adapt in ways most of us could never have imagined. It’s a considerable challenge – and not just for us humans. Whether it’s a cat accustomed…
Wicked Problems, Wicked Solutions 