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: Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy
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…
Aging Today: Why is Age Discrimination Hard to Prove?
This piece originally aired during WFSU’s Aging Today segment. Age discrimination is illegal, but unfortunately, it’s pervasive and hard to prove. More than 1 in 5 claims of discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are based on age, yet just one percent result in a ruling of age discrimination. This low success rate…
COSSPP Faculty Impact on Scholarship: Influence at a Glance
As the spring semester comes to an end, we want to take a moment to celebrate the accomplishments and influence of faculty in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. This series of graphs produced by Dr. Jim Elsner offers a glimpse of the amazing work taking place in the College of Social Science…
Survey Research and the Politics of Old Age Welfare
A recent paper appearing in Theory in Action, co-authored by William R. Earnest and FSU Sociology Professor Irene Padavic and supported by FSU’s Pepper Center on Aging, tackles a flawed proposal from Robert Binstock about minimizing intergeneration conflict over elderly benefits and uses it to analyze how assumptions grounded in interest group liberalism inform current…
Parental Status and Biological Functioning: Findings from the Nashville Stress and Health Study
Our study should not be interpreted as suggesting the solution to the health risks of parenting is to avoid having children altogether. Rather, we believe the current findings signal a need for an increased attentiveness to the health risks of childrearing, particularly for parents with multiple children in the home. We hope the information provided here can inform parents and their healthcare providers of the potential health risks associated with parenting.
