Western society highly values work, and is structured in such a way that people have to be involved in the paid labour force to live. Forms of work that are unpaid are often not recognized as “real” or “meaningful”. Consequently, populations that are not involved in the paid labour force can often be conceptualized as unproductive, which is often the case when discussing retired seniors in Canada. Despite the wide-spread social expectations that older people should be retired and the public programs that enable their retirement, ideals about the makeup of meaningful social roles have not changed very much, and so are applied to this population in a similar manner as to their younger counterparts. In other words, people are not generally seen as socially productive or as having meaningful social roles if they are not active in the paid labour force. For this reason, many sociologists have come to characterize older people as being a “roleless” population. If not characterized as roleless, “retired” in itself has also been classified as a role for elderly people, but the social function of a retired person has not been clearly defined either. Because of this, this Master’s thesis endeavoured to learn more about the work-related roles and identities of retired seniors. Through discussions with seniors about the different work activities they have been involved in throughout their lives, the social expectations projected onto them, and how they conceive their own roles and identities, this study unravels classic definitions of work, leisure, and retirement.

The problem of the present study was to determine the relationships between peer- and self-evaluations on a social roles measurement and the relationships between these evaluations and sociometric rankings.

Explicit gender bias has been found using both experiments and field studies to favor men in hiring, promotion, and career opportunities (Eagly & Carli, 2007), but experimental studies have been criticized for over generalizing results obtained from a "stranger-to-stranger" paradigm (Copus, 2005; Landy, 2008). Landy (2008) argues that gender biases become negligible when raters are familiar with ratees. Additionally, Landy questioned the use of implicit measures to examine bias. Implicit or unconscious bias refers to a cognitive preference for one category over another, such as taking longer to associate female terms with managerial terms on a computerized task, and has also been shown to impact organizational decision making regarding women (Rudman & Kilianski, 2000). Implicit bias measures are often more predictive when bias may be socially undesirable. The goal of this research is to examine the effects of familiarity on automatic or unconscious gender bias. Study 1 examines associations between implicit and explicit measures of gender bias with evaluations of male and female job applicants who engage in agentic, negotiation behavior or not. It was expected that agentic (negotiating) female job applicants, compared to others, would suffer a backlash on ratings of communal traits and that this effect will be exacerbated by individual differences in implicit and explicit gender bias. An effect was found of negotiating being associated with higher agentic traits and lower overall ratings. Negotiating and gender did not interact, however the study did find women were rated as more communal than men. In Study 2 participants completed an Implicit Association Task (IAT) matching unfamiliar and familiar pictures of men and women with agentic and communal terms. It was expected that gender bias towards women would be stronger in the unfamiliar condition than in the familiar condition. Results indicated that there was a consistent bias against associating women with agentic terms and this effect was not influenced by familiarity. In Study 3, participants completed a gender-bias IAT and then read a scenario describing either a man or woman who is being evaluated for a promotion. They were asked to free recall positive and negative outcomes and attributes associated with the person in the scenario. It was expected that participants who have an implicit bias against women would remember negative events from the female scenario more easily than from the male scenario. There was a gender effect with participants remembering more negative events and less positive events when the employee was female compare to when the employee was male. Across all three studies differences were found between explicit and implicit measurements of gender bias. These three studies help us better understand relationships between implicit and explicit gender bias in the workplace. Additionally, Study 2 addressed criticism of gender bias findings ignoring familiarity.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of examining the association between personality as measured by a standard scale and the extent of projection in a social perception role projection task. The investigation assumes that perceptions regarding environment are systematically related to choice behavior. In this regard, the research examines those specific dimensions of personality that facilitate or inhibit social perception. Chapter I presents an introduction to the problem. Additionally, the background of the problem, purpose of the study, the hypotheses, the limits of the study, and the assumptions are given. Chapter II is the methodology. The nature of the subjects, the procedure, the research instrument and the methodological steps used for analysis of data are explained. Results of the investigation are given in Chapter III, while Chapter IV presents a discussion of the results, including the conclusions, implications of the study, and suggestions for further research.

The present study is a corpus-based study which examines social roles constructed in the British nineteenth-century courtroom. To discover the prevalent social roles in British nineteenth-century society the present study focuses on premodifying adjectives characterizing men and women. The method of classification is through semantic domains. The study shows that the social roles of men and women are more similar than the findings of previous research have demonstrated.

The thesis presents analysis on four types of social statuses (as defined by Linton and Merton), namely volunteer, carer for an adult, child carer, and friend, in the second half of life in Germany based on the German Ageing Survey. In reference to the cultural sociological theories of Gerhard Schulze, the impact of retirement as life event on older adults’ lifestyle and likelihood of adopting these statuses is critically discussed. The use of the category of ‘old adult’ is put into question. It is found that between 1996 and 2008 the share of volunteers and of people spending time on leisure activities in company has increased in all age groups in the German population aged 50 and over. Carers, on the other hand, showed stable numbers with decreasing time investment, and the share of people looking after children was on the decline. All social statuses were represented in different numbers in Eastern and Western Germany, with Eastern Germany showing less engagement especially in volunteering and social leisure activities. Possible reasons for this are discussed. The volunteer and friend statuses were selected as dependent variables for regression models of the influence of retirement. The models based on cross-sectional as well as the models based on panel data showed that there was at best a marginal influence of retirement on a person’s likelihood of volunteering or spending leisure time with friends and relatives. With Gerhard Schulze’s theory of the ‘event society’, it is argued that the reason for the increase of volunteers and of people more actively cultivating their friend status amongst older Germans is that they no longer significantly differ in their value orientations and lifestyles from younger adults and that therefore the persistent founding of research and social policy on age categories is no longer a valid approach.

No description available.

My thesis is focused on construction of gender roles in Czech TV shows of the year 2012. First part of the thesis consists of theoretical background, where the principle of feminine and masculine roles, which are constructed by media too, is presented. The thematic foreign and domestic studies, which are introduced there, show how the experts look at this issue. Other chapters are formed by this view and present the most frequented image of women and men on TV or the media principles. Last sections of the theoretical frame are about consumers' everyday habits of watching TV and about impact, which this programmes could have. Second part of this thesis has metodological character. The objective to decode which gender roles are formed by selected programmes Sama doma, Top Star Magazín, menZONE or Těžká dřina and which signs participate on this constructions are described in this part. The research method is semiotic analysis with description of the narrative, thanks to which the hidden myth is revealed more precisely. The quantitative content analysis is also used in analytic part, however, only in a prototypical form. This probe refers to the other possibilities of further extensions of this thesis. All the results demonstrate that the programmes of current domestic production construct women and...

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T22:02:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 4 / Fundo Loyola de Apoio Acadêmico / Neste trabalho apresenta-se um estudo empírico sobre a condição atual de velhos (as) da cidade de Santa Maria/RS, compondo uma análise que perpassa os temas do envelhecimento e da velhice, através da consideração dos papéis sociais no cotidiano, das relações no âmbito da família e da intergeracionalidade, da vida após o trabalho e, finalmente, da condição de sujeito dos (as) velhos (as) na contemporaneidade. Tal condição foi abordada a partir de duas perspectivas: a de sujeito às determinações sociais (perspectiva sociológica) e a de sujeito de experiência (perspectiva psicossocial). A partir de um levantamento inicial de informações (anexo I) a respeito da situação social dos (as) velhos (as) em Santa Maria/RS, buscou-se, através de entrevistas e relatos de histórias de vida (anexo II) e posterior análise, identificar e compreender a amplitude e a complexidade das situações vivenciadas no cotidiano do ser velho (a): a noção desta população sobre o que é, para eles (as), ser velho (a) e a relação enfática / In this research it presents an empirical study on the present condition of the elderly of the city of Santa Maria/ RS, as being part of an analysis that passes by the topics of the aging process through consideration of daily social roles, the relations in the family environment and intergenerational, of life after work and, finally, the subject’s condition of the elderly in the contemporaneity. That circumstance was approached through two perspectives: the subject under the social determinations (Sociological perspective) and the subject of experience (Social psychology perspective). Starting with an initial collection of information (appendix I) referring to the social situation of the elderly in Santa Maria, RS, it has searched for, through interviews and life story speech (appendix II) and later analysis, identifying and understanding the amplitude and the complexity of everyday living situations of being elderly: the notion of that population about what is, for them, to be old and the emphatic relatio

<p>This study examines whether trajectories of multiple social role occupancy, measured by level and dynamics of spouse, parent, and worker roles, are associated with mortality and concurrent trajectories of depressive symptoms and self-rated health. I frame hypotheses with role strain, role enhancement, role context, stress process, and life course theories to examine both within-person changes over age and between-person predictors of health status.</p><p></p><p>I use data from the Americans' Changing Lives Study, a nationally representative accelerated cohort panel study of U.S. adults interviewed in 1986, 1989, 1994, and 2001/2 with mortality tracking through 2006. I use latent class analysis to estimate disaggregated trajectories of role occupancy, role strain, role satisfaction, depressive symptoms, and self-rated health across the adult life course. I then use multinomial and logistic regression analyses to examine associations between role trajectories and health outcomes.</p><p>I find that (1) there is significant heterogeneity in trajectories of role occupancy and characteristics across the adult life course; (2) higher levels of social role occupancy are associated with better depressive symptom and mortality outcomes; (3) lower levels of role strain and higher levels of role satisfaction are associated with better depressive symptom outcomes, and (4); the association between role occupancy and health is robust to the inclusion of role characteristics. Thus, I find support for the role enhancement hypothesis in that higher levels of role occupancy are associated with better health outcomes irrespective of reward and strain associated with those roles.</p> / Dissertation