Avoiding heterosexist bias in psychological research.

The authors describe various ways that heterosexist bias can occur in scientific research and suggest ways that social and behavioral scientists can avoid it. Heterosexist bias is defined as conceptualizing human experience in strictly heterosexual terms and consequently ignoring, invalidating, or derogating homosexual behaviors and sexual orientation, and lesbian, gay male, and bisexual relationships and lifestyles. The deleterious scientific, social, and ethical consequences of such biases are discussed. Questions are provided for researchers to use in evaluating how heterosexist bias might affect their own selection of research questions, sampling, operationalization of variables, data collection, protection of participants, and dissemination of results. Suggestions also are offered for reducing heterosexist bias in academic journals, in textbooks, and in colleges and universities.

Retirement style and retirement satisfaction: retirees aren't all alike.

Postretirement patterns of work--employment for pay, voluntary activities, or no work-like activities--were examined for 1511 recent retirees from major corporations. A related typology of retirement style--reorganizer, rocking chair, holding on, and dissatisfied patterns--was also used. These patterns were examined in terms of preretirement characteristics of the respondents, postretirement attitudes about retirement, and retirement satisfaction. Multivariate analyses comparing the salience of retirement style with health, income, occupation, and preretirement feelings about retiring for predicting retirement satisfaction indicated that retirement style was a significant predictor of overall retirement satisfaction, and the subscales of satisfaction with activities and satisfaction with finances. Implications of these findings for preretirement counseling and retirement policies are discussed.

Life-history interviews of aging gay men.

Homosexual men and women have seldom been studied by gerontologists and almost nothing is known about the lifestyles, pattern of development through the adult years, and the effect of homosexuality on aging. Fourteen gay men, ranging in age from fifty-five to eighty-one, were interviewed about their life history and experiences of aging as gay men. Three of the respondents had long-term relationships that lasted up to forty years; two had experienced the death of a lover and had begun a new long-term relationship; four had been married to women and two had children (one unmarried man adopted a son and is now a grandfather). The wide diversity of their patterns of aging, the presence of positive aspects of gay aging, and the high life satisfaction of many of the respondents contradict the stereotype of the lonely, isolated old gay man.

Retirement choice and retirement satisfaction.

Retirees from major corporations who reported they retired voluntarily were compared with nonvoluntary retirees to determine the individual factors that led to a voluntary or nonvoluntary decision to retire and the impact of that voluntary/nonvoluntary decision on retirement attitudes and satisfaction. Seven firms provided mailing lists of recent retirees, and 1486 respondents completed questionnaires. Voluntary retirees tended to be persons with higher income, occupation, and health status, who had more positive feelings about retirement and more family support for their decision to retire, compared with nonvoluntary retirees. Voluntary retirees were significantly more likely to have positive attitudes and higher satisfaction in retirement than nonvoluntary retirees. However, health status and preretirement feelings about retirement were more significant predictors of retirement attitudes and satisfaction than the voluntary/nonvoluntary decision. Implications of these findings for preretirement counseling and retirement policies are discussed.