This dissertation is a narrative inquiry of the ways in which cultural values, norms, and expectations shape the aging experience of elderly adults living independently in Kasson, a small rural town in southeastern Minnesota, and within Prairie Meadows, Kasson's residential assisted living facility. Despite significant evidence of the reciprocal relationship between community connectedness, successful aging, and healthy communities, we know relatively little about the ways in which contextual meanings of old age influence long-term care and perceptions of well-being in late life. I therefore utilized a variety of interpretive methods, including participant observation, textual analysis, in-depth interviews, and photovoice, to complement and enlarge existing research. Ultimately, I engaged crystallization methodology to co-construct with my participants a multivocal, multigenre text of layered accounts, photographs, stories, and personal reflections. My research design and presentation highlight the inherent possibilities of participatory methods, aesthetic ways of knowing, and asset-based community development for influencing policy and practice at individual, community, and societal levels with typically disenfranchised populations in future communication scholarship. My narrative analysis uncovered three overarching narratives - the "small town" narrative, the "aging in place" narrative, and the "old age" narrative - that guide communicative practices within and between Kasson and Prairie Meadows. Overall, elderly adults in these communities negotiate community connectedness in late life by drawing from or re-storying each of the three narratives. First, they co-construct personal and relational identities through social interactions and shared understandings (e.g., civic engagement, church membership, neighborliness, collective history) of what it means to live in a small town. Second, they face uncertainty (e.g., health and dependency issues) by turning to the past to make sense of the present and future. Third, they embrace old age through membership in age-specific contexts (e.g., Red Hats, senior center, Prairie Meadows) while resisting it in others (e.g., tensions between independence, isolation, and communal life). In total, their stories illuminate the ways in which personal meanings and cultural ideologies support and constrain interactions and decisions in late life as individuals strive for long-term living and a meaningful, supportive place in which to grow old.

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The electric power industry is undergoing a restructuring process. The major goals of the change of the industry structure are to motivate competition, reduce costs and improve the service quality for consumers. In the meantime, it is also important for the new structure to maintain system reliability. Power system reliability is comprised of two basic components, adequacy and security. In terms of the time frame, power system reliability can mean short-term reliability or long-term reliability. Short-term reliability is more a security issue while long-term reliability focuses more on the issue of adequacy. This dissertation presents techniques to address some security issues associated with short-term reliability and some adequacy issues related to long-term reliability in deregulated power systems. Short-term reliability is for operational purposes and is mainly concerned with security. Thus the way energy is dispatched and the actions the system operator takes to remedy an insecure system state such as transmission congestion are important to shortterm reliability. Our studies on short-term reliability are therefore focused on these two aspects. We first investigate the formulation of the auction-based dispatch by the law of supply and demand. Then we develop efficient algorithms to solve the auction-based dispatch with different types of bidding functions. Finally we propose a new Optimal Power Flow (OPF) method based on sensitivity factors and the technique of aggregation to manage congestion, which results from the auction-based dispatch. The algorithms and the new OPF method proposed here are much faster and more efficient than the conventional algorithms and methods. With regard to long-term reliability, the major issues are adequacy and its improvement. Our research thus is focused on these two aspects. First, we develop a probabilistic methodology to assess composite power system long-term reliability with both adequacy and security included by using the sequential Monte Carlo simulation method. We then investigate new ways to improve composite power system adequacy in the long-term. Specifically, we propose to use Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) such as Thyristor Controlled Series Capacitor (TCSC), Static Var Compensator (SVC) and Thyristor Controlled Phase Angle Regulator (TCPAR) to enhance reliability.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Dept. of Gerontology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.

Thesis--University of California, San Francisco. / On spine: The Status passage of elderly persons. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of La Verne, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-191).

Thesis (D. Mus. Arts)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 290-299).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration, August, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.