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While the mature consumer segment (55‐and‐older) is rapidly growing in size, so too are their preferences, motives and spending patterns. The health‐care product and services industry, an industry driven by age, is no exception to the need to identify and accurately target this aging consumer segment. The purpose of this paper is to report on the preferences and marketing implications of this mature consumer segment with respect to health‐care products and services.

The information reported in this paper comes from two large‐scale national studies. The first study gathered information on health‐care services, information sources, payment systems, attitudes toward health‐care providers, and shopping habits. The second study gathered information on selected health‐care products, mass media habits, and several types of health‐related concerns and lifestyles.

The results of these studies show major differences in the way in which consumers within the mature consumer segment respond to various health‐care marketing offerings and provide the basis for developing strategic recommendations for marketing health‐care products and services to the mature population.

This paper uses a segmentation model based on aging processes and life circumstances, known as “gerontographics.” This unique segmentation technique has demonstrated superiority over the past 20 years through research conducted at the Center for Mature Consumer Studies at Georgia State University.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

To investigate how parental divorce and gender might influence the likelihood of engaging in a friends with benefits relationship (FWBR), and the likelihood of binge drinking and unprotected sex practices.

Using self-report measures, 99 undergraduates shared their parental marital history, experiences with FWBRs, and health risk behaviors.

Men, as compared with women, reported significantly more FWBRs as did participants with divorced/separated parents, as compared with those with married parents. Participants who had engaged in an FWBR reported significantly more binge drinking than those with no prior FWBR experience; however, no differences were found for gender or parental marital status. No significant differences emerged regarding the prevalence of unprotected sex.

The current study employed the use of self-report surveys, which can be subject to social desirability. All participants were recruited from a single liberal arts college with a limited sample of men with divorced or separated parents.

Using mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to explore young adults’ predictors and outcomes of engaging in FWBRs provided unique insights into how gender and parental relationships influence both casual sex and health-related behaviors.

EVEN TO THOSE who profess to have made a study of Scottish literature, Sharpe's name is comparatively unknown. He is often thought of as an obscure antiquarian friend of Scott's, the original of Malachi Malagrowther, an eccentric in a city always famed for its eccentrics. Yet one cannot go very far in the study of ballads and of Scottish popular poetry without coming across his name: it was he who contributed one of the finest and most tersely expressed of all the ballads to Scott's Minstrelsy—‘The Twa Corbies’—as well as giving Scott his version of ‘The Douglas Tragedy’ and ‘Bessie Bell and Mary Gray’. A great deal of the material in Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland—that pioneering work which, like most of Robert Chambers's, has not received the attention it deserves—was provided by Sharpe. In the field of demonology and the study of witchcraft, too, he was an authority: his edition of Law's Memorialls was enriched by copious and erudite footnotes and in his introduction, amounting to 254 quarto pages, he wrote a lively and informative historical survey of witchcraft in Scotland from the earliest times until the end of the eighteenth century.

With almost half of college undergraduates engaging in friends with benefits relationships (FWBRs), the current study sought to explore the sexual decision making strategies and potential physical and psychological health outcomes behind these relationships.

Using self-report measures, Study 1 asked 207 undergraduates to rate the importance of motivations, maintenance rules, and future outcomes of FWBRs in their own personal experience and for other men and women. Study 2 sampled 142 undergraduate women who were asked to indicate the percentage of time they engaged in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol or marijuana and the frequency with which they used safe sex practices in an FWBR.

Both genders appeared equally motivated to begin an FWBR; however women reported establishing permanence rules and avoiding over-attachment in the relationship as significantly more important than men. Men were more likely to prefer that the FWBR remain unchanged, however both genders agreed that a transition to a committed relationship was unlikely. Alcohol use was not significantly more prevalent in an FWBR, nor was the likelihood of practicing safe sex.

Both studies employed the use of self-report surveys from a single university and were subject to social desirability.

Quantitatively examining young adults’ reasoning behind choosing to engage in FWBRs provided insight into their overarching fear of “being hurt” and their preference for “easy access” to sexual experiences. These trends may suggest a shift in dating patterns and a preference for avoiding the emotional complexities of a committed, monogamous relationship.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The purpose of this paper is to forward an extension of reception analysis as a way to incorporate and give insight to social media mediations and big data in a qualitative marketing perspective. We propose a research method that focuses on discursive developments in consumer debates for example on YouTube – a large-scale open-access social media platform – as opposed to the closed and tightknit communities investigated by netnography.

Online reception analysis

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we find that big data can enrich online reception analyses by showing new aspects of weak tie online networks and consumers meaning making.

The potential of online reception analysis is to encompass a discursive perspective on consumer interactions on large-scale open-access social media and to be able to analyze socialities that do not represent shared cultures but are more representative of transitory everyday interactions.

Our method contributes to the current focus to define levels of analysis beyond research centered on individuals and individual interactions within groups to investigate other larger socialities. Further, our method also contributes by incorporating and investigating the mediatization of interaction that social media contributes with and therefore our methods actively work with the possibilities of social media. Hence, by extending the advances made by netnography into online spaces, online reception analysis can potentially inform the current status of big data research with a sociocultural methodological perspective.

A YEAR OR TWO AGO there came into my hands a manuscript book about Edinburgh in the 1790s written in his old age in 1854 by a certain John Howell. This book, which had been sent by a relative, proved to be of great interest both topographically and as a record of social life, and was eventually secured by the National Library of Scotland. A few months later, the Keeper of Manuscripts in the Library wrote to me again saying that he believed there might be further eighteenth‐and nineteenth‐century letters and papers in the possession of the former owner of the Howell manuscript, and asking whether she might be willing to allow these to be seen, and possibly acquired, by the Library. The papers turned out to be predominantly family papers, and the central figure in this context was John Brown, M.D., the Edinburgh essayist (1810–82), the author of three volumes of essays and papers, Horae Subsecivae, the best known of which are perhaps ‘Pet Marjorie’ and ‘Rab and his Friends’.

“All things are in a constant state of change”, said Heraclitus of Ephesus. The waters if a river are for ever changing yet the river endures. Every particle of matter is in continual movement. All death is birth in a new form, all birth the death of the previous form. The seasons come and go. The myth of our own John Barleycorn, buried in the ground, yet resurrected in the Spring, has close parallels with the fertility rites of Greece and the Near East such as those of Hyacinthas, Hylas, Adonis and Dionysus, of Osiris the Egyptian deity, and Mondamin the Red Indian maize‐god. Indeed, the ritual and myth of Attis, born of a virgin, killed and resurrected on the third day, undoubtedly had a strong influence on Christianity.