Effects of retirement on cognitive function: A gender and international perspecive

Background: As the global population is ageing, studying cognitive impairments including dementia, one of the leading causes of disability in old age worldwide, is of fundamental importance to public health. As a major transition in older age, a focus on the complex impacts of the duration, timing, and voluntariness of retirement on health is important for policy changes in the future. Longer retirement periods, as well as leaving the workforce early, have been associated with poorer health, including reduced cognitive functioning. These associations are hypothesized to differ based on gender, as well as on pre-retirement educational and occupational experiences, and on post-retirement social factors and health conditions. Methods: A cross-sectional study is conducted to determine the relationship between duration and timing of retirement and cognitive function, using data from the five sites of International Mobility in Aging Study (IMIAS). Cognitive function is assessed using the Leganes Cognitive Test (LCT) scores in 2012. Data are analyzed using multiple linear regressions. Analyses are also done by site/region separately (Canada, Latin America, and Albania). Robustness checks are done with an analysis of cognitive change from 2012 to 2014, the effect of voluntariness of retirement on cognitive function. An instrumental variable (IV) approach is also applied to the cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses as a robustness check to address the potential endogeneity of the retirement variable. Results: Descriptive statistics highlight differences between men and women, as well as between sites. In linear regression analysis, there was no relationship between timing or duration of retirement and cognitive function in 2012, when adjusting for site/region. There was no association between retirement characteristics and cognitive function in site/region/stratified analyses. In IV analysis, longer retirement and on time or late retirement was associated with lower cognitive function among men. In IV analysis, there is no relationship between retirement characteristics and cognitive function among women. Conclusions: While results of the thesis suggest a negative effect of retirement on cognitive function, especially among men, the relationship remains uncertain. A lack of power results in the inability to draw conclusions for site/region-specific analysis and site-adjusted analysis in both linear and IV regressions.

EXAMINING HOW SAME-GENDER AND MIXED-GENDER COUPLES NAVIGATE SEXUAL ISSUES IN THEIR RELATIONSHIPS

Sexual scripts—the definitions and expectations that individuals hold for sexual interactions—are thought to play an important role in the maintenance of sexual well-being. Sexual scripts can be rigid or flexible, and they can be concordant or discordant between members of a couple. Sex therapists support sexual script flexibility for maintaining sexual and relationship satisfaction when couples are navigating sexual issues. However, empirical research examining the role of sexual script flexibility and the degree of script concordance/discordance in couples’ sexual well-being has been limited, due in part to the limited measures available. Furthermore, within the existing research, there has been an unfortunate tendency to exclude individuals in same-gender relationships – perpetuating the long-standing knowledge gap in the literature on positive sexuality in diverse relationships. To address these gaps in the literature, we conducted a series of online studies that recruited individuals in diverse relationships. A measure of individual sexual script flexibility in response to sexual issues was developed (Chapter 2); in addition, the structure of an existing measure assessing couple sexual scripts in response to a sexual issue was evaluated (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 examined how individuals in diverse relationships compared on measures of individual sexual script flexibility and on couple sexual scripts. Findings suggest that there are more similarities than differences across diverse couples. Chapter 5 explored how flexibility in an individual’s approach to sexual issues relates to sexual well-being, specifically by assessing sexual communication and partner responses as mediators. Results suggest that individual sexual script flexibility relates to sexual well-being through reciprocal partner processes. Collectively, this research program suggests that more similarities than differences exist between individuals in same- and mixed-gender relationships, and that partners are important to consider in the relationship between individual sexual script flexibility and sexual well-being. These findings have implications for sex and couple therapy; these results emphasize the importance of interventions that target both members of the couple, and further our understanding of sexuality in same- and mixed-gender relationships.

Disruptive Threads and Renegade Yarns: Domestic Textile Making in Selected Women's Writing 1811-1925

Images of domestic textiles (items made at home for consumption within the household) and textile making form an important subtext to women’s writing, both during and after industrialization. Through a close reading of five novels from the period 1811-1925, this thesis will assert that a detailed understanding of textile work and its place in women’s daily lives is critical to a deeper understanding of social, sexual and political issues from a woman’s perspective. The first chapter will explore the history of the relationship between women and domestic textile making, and the changes wrought to the latter by the Industrial Revolution. The second chapter will examine the role of embroidery in the construction of “appropriate” feminine gentility in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The third chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), will explore how the older female body became a repository for anxieties about class mobility and female power at the beginning of the Victorian era. The fourth chapter will compare Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure (1890) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to consider how later Victorian women both internalized and refuted public narratives of domestic textile making in a quest for “self-ownership.” The last chapter, on Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), examines the corrosive, yet ultimately redemptive, relationships of a family of women trapped by abuse and degradation. For all five authors, images of textiles and textile making allow them to speak to issues that were usually only discussed within a community of women: sexuality, desire, aging, marriage, and motherhood. In all five works, textile making “talks back” to the power structures that marginalize women, and lends insight into the material and emotional circumstances of women’s lives.

Need To Be Adored

Faced with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, I began with the objective of discovering methods for creating art that were still accessible to me. Along the way, I encountered others who had travelled this road before me. Their experiences led me to examine, not only my art, but also my political orientations, my love obligations and my transitioning self. In my varied art pieces, I conjure something from diverse sources and different worldviews, including contemporary feminist performance art and disability cultural theory. My thesis is a project. I make things: puppets, videos and performances, which included the exhibition, Need to be Adored (2014), staged in the digital media lab of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The exhibition introduced thirteen of my puppets and a thirty-two-minute looped video. Following the exhibition, I put the puppets away and spent two years reading. Finally, taking my inspiration from Carolyn Ellis’s The Autoethnographic I (Ellis 2004), I turned my processes into words. I wrote out my experiences. I created an alternative text of my identity from an able-bodied cis-identified woman into a disabled trans-feminist artist academic. The writing required an uncomfortably intimate examination of my life. Nothing less than complete honesty would allow me to understand my new location. The resulting text is a lyrical and sometimes whimsical flow of consciousness that invites the reader to imagine what it might be like to engage in such a candid review of everything one holds close to one’s heart. Contained within are all my identities. In this text I let some out. This is a story of unsettling. I am working on my art practices, creating a cast of characters from cloth. Puppets. El becomes the exulted main character of a fictional accounting. She uncovers her queer roots and begins to see that she is at the centre of a very strange geography. Her desire to make film is revealed as she re-remembers her childhood through a disability lens.