Donna Dosman

Socioeconomic Determinants of Health- and Food Safety-Related Risk Perceptions

Individual and societal perceptions of food-related health risks are multidimensional and complex. Social, political, psychological, and economic factors interact with technological factors and affect perceptions in complex ways. Previous research found that the significant determinants of risk perceptions include socioeconomic and behavioral variables. Most of these past results are based on two-way comparisons and factor analysis. The objective of this study was to analyze the significance of socioeconomic determinants of risk perceptions concerning health and food safety. A multivariate approach was used and the results were compared with earlier bivariate results to determine which socioeconomic predictors were robust across methods. There were two major findings in this study. The first was that the results in the multivariate models were generally consistent with earlier bivariate analysis. That is, variables such as household income, number of children, gender, age, and voting preferences were strong predictors of an individuals risk perceptions. The second result was that the gender of the respondent was the only variable found to be robust across all three classes of health and food safety issues across two time periods.

Productive Activity in Later Life: Stability and Change Across Three Decades

The authors examined time spent on paid and unpaid work across the life course and historically to reflect on connections between activity patterns and macroeconomic events. The authors conducted quasi-cohort analysis on time-use data over 30 years to examine trends in paid and unpaid work. Women aged 40 years and older spent more time on paid work and less time on unpaid work between 1971 and 1998. Men’s paid work time decreased between 1971 and 1981 and between 1992 and 1998 but increased between 1981 and 1992, paralleling economic cycles. Paid work declined in later life, both in cross-sections and within birth cohorts, for men and women, and it declined more rapidly with each successive survey year. Unpaid work peaked around the usual retirement age for men and women in all birth cohorts. Retired seniors remained engaged in productive activities into later life, making a partial substitution of one form of productive engagement for another.

Cheaper for Whom? Costs Experienced by Formal Caregivers in Adult Family Living Programs

Abstract A current emphasis in Canadian public policy is on community care for frail seniors. Such care is viewed as attractive in part because public costs are lower than for traditional nursing home care. Adult Family Living (AFL)is seen as an exemplar of this community focus. Data from a multi-model evaluation of residential continuing care in western Canada are used to show that while AFL programs have lower public costs than nursing homes, AFL caregivers incur high levels of economic and non-economic costs. We address the question of the sustainability of this approach to community-based residential care in light of the apparent transfer of public costs to AFL caregivers.

Assessing Impacts of Environmental Change on Aboriginal People: An Economic Examination of Subsistence Resource Use and Value

The report describes the research design, data collection and preliminary analysis of an economic assessment of non-timber resource use by Aboriginal People in Northwest Saskatchewan. The project is designed to develop methods of valuing resource use by Aboriginal People so that these values can be incorporated into forest resource management decisions and to evaluate the impact of forest management actions on the economic well-being of Aboriginal People living in the region. Data on non-timber resource use are collected and spatially explicit economic models are developed in order to construct estimates of behavioral change and value associated with changes in the environment and landscape (through forestry, access, or other landscape changes).