Older adults constitute a growing population in the United States. A disproportionate percentage of this population experience chronic illnesses and need to recall information important to prevent complications of illness and to self-manage their condition. One example of the need to retain information is to recall the risk factors for ischemic stroke to prevent the damaging effects of stroke.Factors that could influence the recall of health information include age-related changes in cognition, specifically working memory capacity. Research supports that older adults have working memory capacity limitations. Older adults may also experience low health literacy that in combination with declines in working memory could further influence recall of health information.The purpose of this study was to describe the predictive relationships of working memory capacity and health literacy on the recall of the warning signs of stroke in a sample of older community dwelling elders.Fifty-six participants, ranging in age from 68-99 years of age (M= 80 years of age) were recruited from two sites, a Senior Center and Retirement Residence. A brochure published by the American Heart and Stroke Association, "Let's Talk About Stroke" was the tool used to deliver the health information regarding the five warning signs of stroke. Personal factors including demographic and medical variables were collected in this study. Working Memory was assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III, Working Memory Index (WMI). Health literacy was determined using the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (STOFHLA). Participants were asked to recall the health information they were asked to read regarding the five warning signs of stroke at the conclusion of the study visit.Findings indicated that the key variables working memory and health literacy were independently and positively correlated to recall (p < .01); however, regression analysis did not demonstrate an interaction between the two key variables and recall.The findings from this study explore the associations between working memory, health literacy and personal factors and support that these key predictors may be related to the older adults ability to successfully recall health information.

This dissertation examines the formation of an agro-industrial working class within the citrus industry of Valencia, Spain. In a region that was historically defined by intensive agricultural production for market, the citrus industry in Valencia became the dominant economic sector in the decades prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Its workers, straddling the agricultural and the industrial, the rural and the urban, entered into a socio-economic relationship with the rural bourgeoisie in charge of the industry. This relationship was administered through the formation of jurados mixtos (mixed commissions), associations, and citrus cooperatives that directed the harvest, worked out export contracts, began irrigation projects, and organized labor. World War I produced a crisis within the industry due to the collapse of export markets and the lack of available shipping. Workers and small farmers suffered the brunt of the effects, and as a result, their relationships with the bourgeoisie began to break down. By the declaration of the Second Republic in 1931, workers and farmers had become far more politicized and dissatisfied. As landowners and commercial agents fled Valencia after the outbreak of war in 1936, workers and smallholders banded together in collectives, based on the established tradition of cooperation, to preserve the harvest and direct orange exports, the profits of which were increasingly important in the face of prolonged conflict.I rely heavily on documentary evidence from local journals and newspapers, political organizations, contemporary photographs, and local associations. Utilizing gender and labor theory and theories from cultural studies, I show the process of proletarianization through an examination of the labor culture within Valencia in order to complicate our categories of agricultural and industrial work and how the people of Valencia created a regional identity based on orange production.

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The objective of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between motherhood and women's labour force participation in South Africa. The key problem in estimating this relationship is the endogeneity of motherhood/childbearing with respect to women's labour force participation. Childbearing behaviour and decisions to participate in the labour force are jointly determined; and unobservable characteristics which influence childbearing behaviour are also correlated with women's labour force participation. This thesis shows that the definition of motherhood can exacerbate these sources of endogeneity bias. International studies typically identify mothers as women with biological children aged 18 years or younger who are co-resident with at least one of their children. In South Africa, however, a sizeable sample of women is not co-resident with their children. The remaining sample of co-resident mothers are a non-random sample of all mothers who are less likely to participate in the labour force than all mothers. Placing a co-residency restriction on motherhood therefore biases the relationship between motherhood/childbearing and labour force participation. In particular, it overestimates the negative relationship. In the international literature instrumental variable (IV) estimation has been used to disentangle these causal mechanisms. This thesis also considers an application of same sex sibling composition, first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998), as a strategy to identify the exogenous effects of childbearing on women's labour force participation in South Africa. Little or no research has investigated this relationship in South Africa. One possible explanation for this is that studies on female labour force participation in South Africa have not been able to match women to their children with the datasets that have been analysed: most nationally representative household surveys in South Africa do not contain detailed birth history information. The first part of this thesis analyses what data are available to identify women with children and the quality of these data; it also outlines four different methods to match women to their children using these data. The second part of this thesis investigates the relationship between motherhood/childbearing and women's labour force participation in South Africa. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.

The general objectives of this study were to determine the work-home interaction of South African working females, to investigate the prevalence of work-home interaction and to determine if differences concerning work-home interaction exist between different demographical groups. An availability sample (n = 500) was taken from working females within six provinces of South Africa. The SWING and a demographical questionnaire were administered. Structural equation modelling (SEM) showed that a four-factor model, that measures both the direction (work-home interaction and home-work interaction) and the quality (positive or negative) of interaction, fitted the data best. All four factors were reliable, according to the Cronbach alpha coefficients. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to establish differences between work-home interaction and different demographic characteristics. Statistically significant differences exist between demographic groups based on race, language, occupation, parental status, household situation and freedom to arrange circumstances. Recommendations were made for further research / Thesis (M.Com. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The thesis is about a village which has become a part of the industrial city of Bangalore, the ways in which this change in circumstances is taken into account in social relations and moral judgments and tbe relation between Hindu religion and morality. From this local study I draw tentative conclusions about social relations and movements of ideas in Indian industrial society. In chapter 1 (Introduction) I describe the conditions of my fifteen months' fieldwork. I criticize the view that economic and technical changes cause moral or social changes directly and predictably, that the effect of industrialization and urbanization must be to alter 'folk' or 'traditional' society in the direction of a single ideal type of 'urban' or 'industrial' society and that this must involve great social strain and breakdown of norms. Social change means changes in moral values and ideologies. Changes in economic and other circumstances do not determine ideologies, but are taken into account as reasons for altering social categories and making new kinds of value judgments. It is at this level of ideologies and values, rather than of 'ideal types' constructed out of external similarities, that it is useful to make comparisons between societies. Indian ideologies are expressed particularly in religious terms and the key to understanding social change in India lies in the changing relations between religion and morality. Chapter 2 (History and description) traces the village's history from its foundation around 1800 to its incorporation into Bangalore (pop. 1.2m) in the 1950s, and describes the present appearance of the village and housing conditions within it. The leading peasant families sold their land for building or built on it themselves, and became building contractors or wholesale merchants. Their sons were educated in English, and tended to become factory workers or clerks. Half the village's population of 6700 belong to families of recent immigrants. More than half the village's workers are in positions requiring some skill or responsibility. Bangalore consists largely of a network of such urban villages which are not submerged but become more conscious of their identity as the neighbourhood gains moral significance at the expense of communities of birth. Chapter 3 (Groups within the village) describes the vestiges of traditional relations between castes and the surviving village offices. These things, like village cults and festivals, acquire a new value as the reality of rural life recedes and the village's recent past is idealized in the myth of a co-operating community, associated with peasant virtues. Immigrants as well as old families are attached to the village, as a unit in which relations are moral rather than economic, and particularly as an arena in which claims to respect or status can be defended. The villagers are divided into old families and immigrants, by language (half speak Tamil the rest mainly Teluga or Kannada), by religion (four fifths are Hindus, the rest Giristians apart from a few Muslims), by caste by 'family', which varies in meaning according to the situation, by economic class, by economic relations of creditor and debtor, or of employer and employee in the case of the minority who work for other villagers by education by age, by sex by occupation, by party and faction, by voluntary associations.,by close neighbourhood and by friendship. Wherever possible I give statistics, based on a sample survey of every tenth household. In chapter 4 (Caste and family) I discuss caste ideology, the religious justification of hierarchy, the place of endogamy and occupation, and the relation between castes and 'subcastes'. I describe the main castes of the village, most of which belong to the 'middle' block of castes and are social equals, the situations in which caste counts, and the way in which endogamous groups divide, unite, overlap and change their names. The closed endogamous group tends to be replaced by overlapping marriage circles, which the household may redefine for itself within limits. Ideal relations within the family may be inferred from simple rules about who is entitled to respect, but the content of this respect, and the criteria for giving it, are changing in the direction of equality and autonomy. Chapters 5 and 6 (Religion) describe cults of the whole village, cults of other groups and personal religion. I distinguish three aspects of Hinduism: brahmanism, associated with prestige and auspiciousness, and with the values of dharma (order), permanence, hierarchy, purity and ritual, the religion of groups, for the protection and welfare of closed communities, and the religion of choice, associated with moksha or liberation, renunciation, devotion, the direct relation of the soul to God, and, particularly in the modern form of this kind of religion with conscience, responsibility and service. Brahmanism and group religion are complementary. The thinking that characterizes then is thoroughly hierarchical: men are arranged in a hierarchy of birth and function, the legitimate ends of life in a hierarchy of value. Each item in the hierarchy is justified Dy its association with those above it. Just as castes derive status from their relation to Brahmans, the interest (artha) of groups is justified by and subordinate to the eternal order (dharma) of the whole, and group religion is justified by and subordinate to brahmanism. The religion of choice tends to make universal not hierarchical distinctions, and to regard worshippers as equals. Each of these aspects is particularly associated with one of the three main temples in the village: the ore brahmanical temple, the temple of the village's patron goddess, and a Math or religious institution built over the grave of a Guru. The Math is a centre not only of devotional religion, but of social and moral innovation: its younger devotees organized a night school for village children, and have been prominent in other enterprises associated with the ideology of 'social service'. They transformed universalistic ethical beliefs which were latent and unstressed into the common assumptions of a generation influenced by the reforming enthusiasm, moral fervour and equalitarianism of the Independence movement. In chapter 7 (Respect) I consider the use and meaning of 'respect' and words connected with it ('big man' andc). Respect is a fundamental social value and the form in which economic and other relations on larger scales are projected on to the village's scale of values. It has two main components 'prestige', a given, de facto quality related to birth, wealth and influence, and 'honour', a moral, de jure quality depending on the autonomous moral judgments of others. In modern conditions the second component tends to gain importance at the expense of the first, and the conversion of wealth or power into status conies to depend now on complying with universalistic norms. Forms of organization for common action are compromises between two types: the traditional pancaayat or council, where decisions are taken by consensus and 'big men' respected for their 'prestige' take the initiative, and the modern association, where decisions are voted on and men respected for their personal moral qualities take the initiative. I describe a municipal election, and the two ways in which candidates build up support by acting through dyadic links of 'respect' and by a direct appeal to voters or supporters through ideological arguments. Chapter 8 (Values) I relate values and social relations in the village to the two types which Piaget calls heteronomy aud autonomy. Heteronomy is associated with constraint, hierarchy and unilateral respect, autonomy with aspiration, equality and mutual respect. They correspond to Bergson's closed and open types of morality, religion and society.

This study analyses the ‘prose of circumstances’ which implies the ‚discovery of prose fiction by the working-class movement in Germany from 1863 to 1906‘. In its introduction, it points to the prior history in the 1840s. The aim is both to identify developments in the working-class prose and to further differentiate the literary network in the second half of the 19th century. Previous research mostly perceived working-class literature from a socio-historical perspective; the last publications date back more than thirty years. Mostly summaries and not monographs, they focus on poetry and theatre of the labour movement. In contrast, this study looks into various forms of prose writing: a pre-revolutionary novel fragment by G. Weerth, a novel in three volumes dealing with the foundation phase of social democracy by J.B. von Schweitzer; short narratives published in feuilletons and calendars of the 1870s by the authors C. Lübeck, A. Otto-Walster and R. Schweichel; autobiographical writing from 1867 to 1906 by J.M. Hirsch, H.W.F. Schultz and F.L. Fischer as well as a piece of early social reportage by P. Göhre. In this way, the study presents a spectrum of diverse narrative modes, reflects on the conditions of genre and highlights differences and similarities at the same time. By considering source texts and intertextual relations, I do not examine the narrative pieces separately, but in their interdependence with other texts. The study focuses on narrative characteristics while examining overall literary and social developments. As a sequence of case studies, the chosen working-class prose narratives can be perceived from an innovative angle. The majority of texts are discussed in detail and related to contemporary bourgeois texts for the first time. Thus, the dominant perspective of bourgeois and poetic realism is broadened by the category of ‘social realism’. For this reason, the study can be seen as a contribution to a revised understanding of literature in the second half of the 19th century.