Financial literacy, financial judgement, and retirement self-efficacy of older trustees of self-managed superannuation funds

The author used role theory, continuity theory, and the life course perspective to form hypotheses regarding the different retirement transition and adjustment patterns and how different individual and contextual variables related to those patterns. The longitudinal data of 2 samples (n(1) = 994; n(2) = 1,066) from the Health and Retirement Survey were used. Three latent growth curve patterns of retirees' psychological well-being were identified as coexisting in the retiree samples through growth mixture modeling (GMM) analysis. On the basis of the latent class membership derived from GMM, retiree subgroups directly linked to different growth curve patterns were profiled with individual (e.g., bridge job status) and contextual variables (e.g., spouse working status). By recognizing the existence of multiple retiree subgroups corresponding to different psychological well-being change patterns, this study suggests that retirees do not follow a uniform adjustment pattern during the retirement process, which reconciles inconsistent previous findings. A resource perspective is further introduced to provide a more integrated theory for the current findings. The practical implications of this study are also discussed at both individual level and policy level. ((c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved.

In this article, we use meta-analysis to analyze gender differences in recent studies of mathematics performance. First, we meta-analyzed data from 242 studies published between 1990 and 2007, representing the testing of 1,286,350 people. Overall, d = 0.05, indicating no gender difference, and variance ratio = 1.08, indicating nearly equal male and female variances. Second, we analyzed data from large data sets based on probability sampling of U.S. adolescents over the past 20 years: the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, the Longitudinal Study of American Youth, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Effect sizes for the gender difference ranged between -0.15 and +0.22. Variance ratios ranged from 0.88 to 1.34. Taken together, these findings support the view that males and females perform similarly in mathematics.