Why did you decide to become an academic? I think I became an academic because I never wanted to stop going to school! When I was an undergraduate, I realized that I enjoyed using data – whether survey responses, interview excerpts, or cultural products – to tell stories about the social world. An interest in…
Category: Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy
Meet a Social Scientist: Dr. Homan from Sociology.
What is your name?Dr. Patricia Homan. What kind of work do you do in the college?I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. I am also an Associate at FSU’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy and a Research Affiliate of the Center for Demography and Population Health. I teach, do…
Aging Today: Does the Nightly News Accurately Represent the Participation of Older Americans in Social Movements?
This post is based on Aging Today’s Minutes and Moments segment. No. Television news does not always accurately represent the participation of older Americans in social movements. For example, survey research found that 29% of the individuals attending Tea Party events were between the ages of 50 and 64, and 21% of attendees were over…
Aging Today: Is it True that Younger People are More Politically Engaged than Older People?
This post is based on Aging Today’s Minutes and Moments segment. It depends on how you define political engagement. Take voting, for example. It is true that older Americans vote at higher rates than younger ones. According to the United States Census Bureau, 70.9% of individuals 65 and older eligible to vote cast a ballot…
Ph.D. Spotlight: The Disablement Process of Aging United States Veterans.
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…
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…
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,…
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…
