Cohort changes in attitudes about the availability of legal abortions are traced over a 12-year period using data from seven national surveys. Contrary to the aging-conservatism hypothesis, trends in the direction of increasingly favorable attitudes between 1965 and 1973 and general stability thereafter characterize all cohorts. On this issue,…

The purpose of this paper is to consider the concept of "relative age" and to review recent research findings that have demonstrated that relative age is related to a variety of academic and athletic performance measures. The paper is divided into six parts: (1) the relative age concept; (2) relative age and achievement in sports; (3)…

The present study explored the dynamics of expectancy effects. The process by which labels about children provided to adults (but not to the children themselves) achieve their outcomes was investigated. Forty-eight undergraduate females were provided with information about children whom they were to instruct; each undergraduate was then…

The age-status system in adulthood was investigated, using a 58-item instrument which divided adulthood subjectively into three periods: normative expectations for various adulthood developmental tasks (marriage, parenthood, employment, retirement, etc.); the lower age constraints ("too young") for these behaviors. In addition, 22 items regarding…

Simultaneous maximum likelihood procedures were used to investigate the generality of ability factor structure in adulthood and old age. Data were analyzed for 198 subjects aged 15-32; 173 subjects aged 51-67; and 153 subjects aged 68-83. Variables were 14 ability tests marking five cognitive factors: verbal comprehension, number facility,…

A study collected data from 763 door-to-door interviews to test hypotheses about the uses and gratifications associated with newspaper readerships. In the interviews, respondents were identified demographically, asked about their newspaper reading behaviors, and asked to reply to a series of uses and gratifications statements on why they read…

This paper criticizes Zajonc's confluence model of the relationship between sibling spacing and sibling intelligence. According to Zajonc, variations in the intellectual performance of individuals are accounted for in part by two features of the individual's family of orientation: (1) the number of children in that family, and (2) the spacing…

The symposium celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Division of Continuing Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo; changes in higher education during those 50 years have moved adult learning into a primary area of attention. Traditional lines of learning are bluring and assumptions about the adult learner are rapidly changing.…

This paper reviews studies in which scores on Piagetian tests of logical thought were correlated with IQ, mental age (MA) and chronological age (CA), and examines the possible effects of the size of the age range and mean age of subjects on these correlations. The data included 44 groups of subjects obtained from 36 studies in which Piagetian and…

In seeking to explore theorists' claims that learning, education, and development in old age are linked, this qualitative study investigated how seeking a graduate or undergraduate degree functions in late-life development. Sixteen participants, ages 70 to 84, enrolled in higher education, were interviewed with a view to exploring their major…

The book contains papers presented at a July 1973 conference sponsored by the Engineering Foundation of New York City, the American Psychological Association, and the Engineering Foundation for Professional Development. The papers examine the psychological and motivational changes which occur in midcareer engineers (Approximately age 40), with…

This paper analyses the influence of age on the acquisition of English as a third language by focusing on the development of general proficiency in English by school children. Participants were 60 secondary school students who had studied English for 6 years but started learning it at different ages. All participants completed a battery of tests…

Considerable study has been focused on relationships between learning styles and other characteristics and conditions, such as teaching styles, achievement, student age, and student gender. In 1991, a study was conducted on two campuses of a comprehensive community college in the southeast to measure the effect on course grades of the relationship…

About 2.7 of every 10 16- through 24-year-olds unemployed during March, 1979, were discharged from their last jobs. Regression analysis of data from the March, 1979, Current Population Survey revealed that 16- and 17 year-olds were more than twice as likely as 20- through 24-year-olds to have lost their last job; veterans were about 1.5 times as…