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This chapter considers the disparities in political activity on the basis of age and what their implications for the representation of the opinions, concerns, and needs of all are. It attempts, in short, to analyze life-cycle, cohort, and period effects. Life-cycle effects refer to the social, psychological, and physical changes that take place as individuals age. In any society, particular experiences tend to correspond to particular stages in the life cycle. Using data from American National Election Studies (ANES) panel studies and from more than a half century of ANES cross-sections, this chapter investigates the origins of gaps among age groups in participation and finds evidence for both cohort and life-cycle effects.

This chapter examines trends in all-cause mortality and in coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, breast cancer, and lung cancer. These diseases show very different patterns over time and place but all had a significant impact on women's health in the 20th century. The first three are the classic “life course diseases” affected by factors operating at every stage of life and which may have interactive effects on individual disease risk. Trends in lung cancer are also considered given the importance of this disease for cohorts of women born in the 20th century.

It is widely believed that trends in ischemic heart disease (IHD) death rates in many countries have risen to a synchronized peak at every age and then declined. This has been taken as evidence that the factors responsible for the rise and fall in rates have acted in adult life. It has also been taken as evidence against the important influence of early life factors on the incidence of disease. The argument is that early life factors would produce cohort effects, that is, changes in the rates that were synchronized according to year of birth rather than year of death. This chapter examines trends in IHD rates in England and Wales to assess whether this popular belief is true. It also analyzes cerebrovascular disease rates in England and Wales.

This chapter discusses cohort data. The term cohort often refers to a group of individuals classified by levels of a risk factor to investigate its influence on the incidence of a disease. The cohort effect, birth cohort effect and proportional mortality data, median polish analysis, and mean polish analysis are discussed.

Assessment of age, period, and cohort effects in the temporal variation of psychiatric disorders is important for understanding changes in the nature and magnitude of the effect of aetiologically important exposures, and the identification of particular cohorts with higher than expected rates of psychiatric disorders is vital for public health planning and intervention efforts. This chapter reviews evidence for age, period, and cohort effects in major depression, substance use disorders, and autism spectrum disorders in the USA—three disorders with sufficient evidence bases for robust inference across studies. Existing research supports a role for cohort effects in the incidence and prevalence of alcohol use disorders as well as cigarette and marijuana use, and autism diagnoses. Whereas cohort effects in major depression have been documented, the existence of cohort effects remains controversial due to data suggesting that a retrospective reporting bias may explain a large part of these results.

American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men’s labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation of older women consists disproportionately of those working at full-time jobs. Increased labor force participation of women in their older ages is part of the general increase in cohort labor force participation. Cohort effects, in turn, are mainly a function of educational advances and greater prior work experience. But labor force participation rates of the most recent cohorts in their forties are less than those for previous cohorts. These factors may suggest that employment at older ages will stagnate or even decrease. But several other factors will be operating in an opposing direction and leads us to conclude that women are likely to continue to work even longer.

Chapter 5 highlights the social stratification of individual transnationalism using an analysis of Eurobarometer survey data (2006, 2007). The findings show that individual transnationalism is by no means a mainstream phenomenon. Relatively few Europeans interact across borders on a regular basis, while the majority remain (predominantly) within the confines of their nation state. In all models, high education, high socio-economic status, age, and residence in urban and border areas are strong predictors of transnational behaviour. Results suggest profound differences among citizens from different member states. Subsequent analyses test the effect of a country’s degree of transnationalization, measured by the KOF index of globalization, as well as its economic prosperity, geographical position and population size. People from wealthier and more globalized countries are more transnational. Also, a country’s size is inversely related to the transnationalism of its citizens.

Episodic memory declines across the human adult lifespan. This well-attested finding has prompted the use of functional neuroimaging to identify the neural regions and networks underpinning memory that are most heavily impacted by increasing age, as well as neural mechanisms that might compensate for these impacts and ameliorate age-related memory decline. In the present chapter several of the methodological issues confronting such research are outlined and discussed. These issues include difficulties of identifying effects of aging from cross-sectional designs, age-related sampling bias, age-related differences in neurovascular coupling, and possible confounding effects of performance on age-related differences in neural measures. The chapter concludes with examples of how functional neuroimaging data derived from cross-sectional studies of aging can be employed to address questions concerning the functional neuroanatomy of episodic memory, and how this might differ with age.

This chapter summarizes the period, age, and cohort effects that influence whether a Catholic woman in the United States will enter a religious institute and which institute she will choose. Implications for religious institutes of both the traditionalist (CMSWR) and the progressive (LCWR) conferences of Catholic sisters, and also for the Catholic Church in general, are discussed. Recommendations are made.

The chapter discusses the nature of volunteering, then presents research from three domains to highlight the relations between volunteering and culture. First, the chapter describes cross-national differences in volunteering rates using data from the World Values Survey and review the evidence for cross-cultural differences in predictors of volunteering. Next, the chapter uses historical data from a large corpus of published books to examine the association between moral foundation words and volunteering. Finally, the chapter tests predictions based on these associations using data from the Midlife in the United States survey. The chapter concludes with a discussion of volunteering as influenced by cultural values that differ both across cultures and within the same culture over time.

The development of gay identity is explored across the three generations of gay men. Commonalities of the psychological process and behaviors in relation to identity realization and disclosure are examined through the life narratives and in relation to the extant literature. These life narratives are contextualized through Eli Coleman’s paradigm of gay identity development across all the stages ranging from initial periods of pre–coming out, when many gay men begin to experience their sexuality, to the point in which sexuality becomes integrated into one’s whole identity. The challenges of each stage are explored across the cohort of men as illuminated through the life stories, and in relation to social and political circumstances that shaped the historical epochs in which the were developing their gay identities.