Matilda White Riley
Matilda White Riley
Matilda White Riley was an American gerontologist who began working at Rutgers University as a research specialist before becoming a professor from 1950 to 1973. Here she wrote a textbook and discovered her interest in aging. In 1973, Riley became the first woman full professor at Bowdoin College, where she worked until 1981. She spent much of her career as a sociologist specializing in aging at t
"Interviewing individual group members separately affords privacy and encourages all members to answer. Respondents may be more frank if that others in the group will not hear what they say (thereby removing the possibility of group sanctions). This may be the best way of obtaining responses from individuals with lower positions (younger, lower , e.g.) in the group, who might be intimidated by a group interview situation."
Matilda White Riley"Because of unprecedented increases in , the structure has been transformed. Linkages among family members have been prolonged, and the surviving generations in a family have increased in number and complexity. Todays kinship structure (which has no parallel in history) can be viewed in a new way: as a latent web of continually shifting linkages that provide the potential for activating and intensifying close family relationships. These relationships are no longer prescribed as strict obligations, but must be earned—created and recreated by family members over their lives. Such changes in the structure and dynamics of family relationships raise many questions and issues for students of the family including the development of special research approaches needed to understand the complexity of these relationships and the nature of older peoples family relationships in the future."
Matilda White Riley"Todays social structures and norms are the vestigial remains of the nineteenth-century, when most people died before their work was finished or their last child had left home. Age 65 was established as the criterion for —yet age 65 is still used in many countries under todays utterly changed conditions of longevity."
Matilda White Riley"Parents who believed in the value of "getting ahead" started to apply pressure from the beginning of the school career."
Matilda White Riley"... one seems forced to conclude that a disproportionally large number of the nations "pockets of poverty" are found in rural-farm areas."
Matilda White Riley"Remember that, as a sociologist, your focus is on social interaction—i.e., not on the biological or psychological processes of the actors, but on their and expression to each other of their underlying orientation, feelings, and attitudes."
Matilda White Riley
