Holistic Structure Research Articles

The Perceptions of Graphic Design Concept on Students Study on Graphic Design

The purpose of this study is to examine the graphic design concept perceptions of university students who take graphic design education by using metaphors. The research was carried out with 160 students from the Department of Graphic Design at Inonu University, Hacı Bayram Veli University and Necmettin Erbakan University. A total of 142 students (87 female and 55 male) were considered to be surveyed. The students were asked a personal information form and an open-ended question via a questionnaire prepared by qualitative research method. The analysis of the survey data was evaluated by the content analysis method from qualitative research techniques. According to the analysis, the participants created 96 metaphors. The most repeated metaphors for graphic design are; Dreaming (7), Universe (6) and Freedom (6).The common characteristics of these metaphors produced by the participants were collected in eight sub-categories which are Effort /Labor dependent structure, Unlimited structure, Useful structure that facilitates, Multi-dimensional structure, Target-oriented structure, Changeable structure, Holistic structure, Uniform structure.According to the result obtained in the study, there are different perceptions of the graphic design based on gender and grades.

Sustainable carbon management in corporate governance: A case study

Institutional structures having leader roles in sustainable development must make regular and sustainable situation analyses to improve management strategies and particularly energy resources when environmental strategies are being developed. However, in Turkey, there is not a model defined to develop in particular sustainable carbon management strategies in a holistic structure. These approaches, as a decision support component, will provide significant gains in terms of monitoring, managing and projecting of energy consumptions responsible for carbon threat in institutions. In this respect, it is necessary to develop an institutional model and to create feasible actions. However, in management inputs, it is important that the energy efficiency, the usage densities and the consumption efficiency potentials are shaped with which criteria and how. This study, which is addressed in this direction, has been shaped as a public model for enterprise structures.This work first presents a structure including an integrated carbon management system, which collecting public buildings in a single system management architecture that targets all components within their context. This model study aimed to manage the dynamic consumption processes for each building based on resource demand management. It is aimed to provide a manageable, controllable and developable infrastructure by creating a common language for the terminals of the energy systems having different languages and structures, which is the main source of carbon emissions. Early results from preliminary studies in some schools point to savings of over 20% in consumption.

Package Network Model: A Way to Capture Holistic Structural Features of Open-Source Operating Systems

Open-source software has become a powerful engine for the development of the software industry. Its production mode, which is based on large-scale group collaboration, allows for the rapid and continuous evolution of open-source software on demand. As an important branch of open-source software, open-source operating systems are commonly used in modern service industries such as finance, logistics, education, medical care, e-commerce and tourism, etc. The reliability of these systems is increasingly valued. However, a self-organizing and loosely coupled development approach complicates the structural analysis of open-source operating system software. Traditional methods focus on analysis at the local level. There is a lack of research on the relationship between internal attributes and external overall characteristics. Consequently, conventional methods are difficult to adapt to complex software systems, especially the structural analysis of open-source operating system software. It is therefore of great significance to capture the holistic structure and behavior of the software system. Complex network theory, which is adequate for this task, can make up for the deficiency of traditional software structure evaluation methods that focus only on local structure. In this paper, we propose a package network model, which is a directed graph structure, to describe the dependency of open-source operating system software packages. Based on the Ubuntu Kylin Linux Operating system, we construct a software package dependency network of each distributed version and analyze the structural evolution through the dimensions of scale, density, connectivity, cohesion, and heterogeneity of each network.

Dynamic gas kick regulation through control reconfiguration under MPD scenario – Two-phase flow validation

Controlling gas kick is essential to guarantee safe drilling of oil wells. As the gas flows toward the surface, its volume increases due to gas expansion, reducing mud weight. As a result, an uncontrolled gas kick may produce a blowout. A literature review, concerning MPD (Managed Pressure Drilling) technology, unveils that there is a gap regarding experimental validation of gas kick control strategies. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is building an experimental unit, representing the oil well drilling process, for dynamic gas kick control validation. Pressure, flow and level data are employed for real-time monitoring and control purposes. A drift-flux mathematical model (DFM) and a control reconfiguration scheme are validated using two-phase flow data from the experimental facility. The transient nature of the oil well drilling process, exhibiting a variety of operational modes and being nonlinear was successfully regulated by control reconfiguration, which works as an advanced control holistic structure.

Incorporating life cycle assessment and ecodesign tools for green chemical engineering: A case study of competences and learning outcomes assessment

Chemical engineers assume a broad range of roles in industry, spanning the development of new process designs, the maintenance and optimization of complex systems, and the production of intermediate materials, final products and new technologies. The technical aptitude that enables chemical engineers to fulfill these various roles along the value chain makes them compelling participants in the environmental assessment of the product in question. Therefore, the introduction of life cycle assessment (LCA) and ecodesign concepts into the chemical engineering curriculum is essential to help these future professionals to face design problems with a holistic view of the technical, economic, social and environmental impacts of their solutions. The teaching of these and other disciplines by means of student-centered methods, based on a holistic structure, have demonstrated better teamwork and communication skills. For that reason, this paper proposes a Micro (Assess-Analyze-Act) (M-3A) model of assessment mainly focused on closing the loop of the learning activities. This model has been applied to an ecodesign case study of the “University master’s Degree in chemical engineering” of the University of Cantabria/University of the Basque Country, with positive feedback of the students. They felt that the approach has allowed them to utilize their analytical skills in quantifying a situation before applying other subjective measures, and that the public discussion of the results was a satisfactory element for improving their communication skills. Moreover, the students found that the workload was nicely adjusted, highlighting the acquisition of 4 competences preferentially: teamwork, creativity; relevance of environmental issues and initiative and entrepreneurship. Finally, the students suggest that the application of this methodology into their degree could motivate future students improving their performance.

THE FACTORS OF OCCUPATIONAL CHOICE IN THE STRUCTURE OF ELECTIONS STRATEGIES OF EMPLOYEES OF THE NATIONAL POLICE OF UKRAINE

Way of life depends not only on knowledge, consciousness, self-consciousness, but of the whole personality, life choices as a response of the individual to certain circumstances and events are the effect of its holistic structure that refracts, mediates all external actions, events and circumstances of life. Today psychological processes life choices need to be considered as the core sistematiki personality factor.In modern psychological science temporal aspects of the development of consciousness of the individual, its life is widely represented as a classical (Col. A. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, T. V. Berezina), and the latest research (Of. A. Kireeva, T. M. Titarenko), which reveal different aspects of the life-world of the individual.Were investigated subjective and social factors of occupational choice in the structure of elections strategies of police officers. Established, that the conditionality of life choices such subjective factors as the interest, advice from friends and the vocation, indicates the adequacy of the strategies researched life choices of employees of bodies of internal Affairs. Tool subjective factors life professional choices, as well as indifferent attitude was characterized by low hierarchical priority. We have identified the structure of the relationships between subjective factors of life, which is described by two orthogonal components: «Semideterminate — reactivity and Influence of friends (external value) — the influence of parents (intrinsic value)».

《文心雕龍》所隱涵二重“文心”的結構及其功能

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 劉勰將自己的著作命名爲《文心雕龍》，很自覺地使用“文心”與“雕龍”兩個關鍵詞，表述全書的文學理論體系。什麽是“文心”？劉勰只簡單説是“爲文之用心”，也就是創作文章所運用的“心”；然而，這一“文心”實質的内涵是什麽？包含哪些要素？諸多要素之間，以什麽邏輯關係形成整體的“結構”？這一“結構”有何相應的“功能”？這是“文心雕龍學”必須解答的基本論題；然而，關於這一論題，學界至今只做了粗略、表淺的論説。本論文針對《文心雕龍》全書的相關文本，經由精密的分析，有效地揭明其中隱含的二重“文心”，並分别詮釋這二重“文心”各自具有什麽實質内涵？各自包含哪些要素？諸多要素之間，以什麽邏輯關係形成整體的“結構”？而這一“結構”有何相應的“功能”？
 When entitling his Wenxin diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), Liu Xie consciously employed the two key terms wenxin and diaolong to recapitulate the theoretical framework of the book. But, what is wenxin? Liu Xie only explains it as “the creative mind for literary composition.” Several questions have remained unanswered. They include: what is the actual content of wenxin? What elements are included? With what logic and relationship are these elements connected to make a comprehensive “structure”? To what functions does this “structure” correspond? These are unavoidable questions in the scholarship of wenxin diaolong. However, these questions have not been amply answered and only dealt with in a rough and shallow manner. The present essay focuses on related contexts in the Wenxin diaolong and shall analyze and interpret the content, essential elements, and logical structure of the double “literary mind,” attempting to discover its holistic structure and its corresponding features.

Reconstruction-based supervised hashing

In the context of large scale similarity search, one promising technique is to encode high dimensional data as compact binary codes to take advantage of the speed and storage efficiencies. Many existing hashing approaches achieve similarity preservation in the Hamming space by preserving similarity relationship between data points. However, most of these methods only consider the relationship between points, which can not capture the data structure comprehensively. In this paper, we propose a reconstruction-based supervised hashing (RSH) method to learn compact binary codes with holistic structure preservation. The proposed method characterizes the similarity structure by the relationship between each data point and the structure generated by the remaining points. The learning objective is set to simultaneously minimize the distance between each point and the structure with the same class label and maximize the distance between each point and the structure with different class labels. In cross-modal retrieval, we propose a reconstruction-based hashing method by distilling the correlation structure in the common latent hamming space. The correlation structure characterizes the semantic correlation by the relationship between data points and structures in the common hamming space. Minimizing the reconstruction error of each single-modal latent model makes hidden layer outputs representative for the input of each modality. Experimental results in both single-modal and cross-modal datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods when compared to several recently proposed approaches.

Risk-based cost-benefit analysis for evaluating microbial risk mitigation in a drinking water system.

Waterborne outbreaks of gastrointestinal diseases can cause large costs to society. Risk management needs to be holistic and transparent in order to reduce these risks in an effective manner. Microbial risk mitigation measures in a drinking water system were investigated using a novel approach combining probabilistic risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. Lake Vomb in Sweden was used to exemplify and illustrate the risk-based decision model. Four mitigation alternatives were compared, where the first three alternatives, A1-A3, represented connecting 25, 50 and 75%, respectively, of on-site wastewater treatment systems in the catchment to the municipal wastewater treatment plant. The fourth alternative, A4, represented installing a UV-disinfection unit in the drinking water treatment plant. Quantitative microbial risk assessment was used to estimate the positive health effects in terms of quality adjusted life years (QALYs), resulting from the four mitigation alternatives. The health benefits were monetised using a unit cost per QALY. For each mitigation alternative, the net present value of health and environmental benefits and investment, maintenance and running costs was calculated. The results showed that only A4 can reduce the risk (probability of infection) below the World Health Organization guidelines of 10-4 infections per person per year (looking at the 95th percentile). Furthermore, all alternatives resulted in a negative net present value. However, the net present value would be positive (looking at the 50th percentile using a 1% discount rate) if non-monetised benefits (e.g. increased property value divided evenly over the studied time horizon and reduced microbial risks posed to animals), estimated at 800-1200 SEK (€100-150) per connected on-site wastewater treatment system per year, were included. This risk-based decision model creates a robust and transparent decision support tool. It is flexible enough to be tailored and applied to local settings of drinking water systems. The model provides a clear and holistic structure for decisions related to microbial risk mitigation. To improve the decision model, we suggest to further develop the valuation and monetisation of health effects and to refine the propagation of uncertainties and variabilities between the included methods.

Development of a framework for the implementation of sustainable enterprise resource planning

Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning (S-ERP) is an enterprise system that designed to integrate sustainability activitiesbetween corporate sustainable business functions. This system enables practitioners to effectively practice sustainability in an organisation. Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung (SAP), Oracle, and Microsoft have designed the S-ERP system for various types of industry. However, a number of organisations still have a problem of implementing the S-ERP system as it is a multifaceted system that needs managerial and technical skills to implement. Therefore, they need a master plan that provides a comprehensive guidance for practitioners to implement this system. According to a literature, there is no available master plan that assists the organisations to implement the S-ERP system. This issue will obstruct the implementation process. Therefore, this issue motivates the researchers to develop an S-ERP master plan that encompasses three parts: roadmap, framework, and guidelines. A study focused on the development of an S-ERP roadmap has been performed in the earlier work entitled “A master plan for the implementation of sustainable enterprise resource planning systems (part II): development of a roadmap” (Chofreh et al., 2016b). In addition, the S-ERP roadmap has been evaluated in the work entitled “A master plan for the implementation of sustainable enterprise resource planning systems (part III): evaluation of a roadmap” (Chofreh et al., 2016c). Subsequently, this study aimed to summarise the development process of the S-ERP framework. This frameworkwould give a comprehensive perspective to implement the S-ERP system. A conceptual research method is used to develop this framework by reviewing two related areas on sustainability and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system implementation and exposing the knowledge gap. The literature revealed that there are diverse dimensions considered in the sustainability and ERP implementation frameworks. These dimensions are generally considered two main paradigms including sustainability paradigm and decisional paradigm. The sustainability paradigm consists of three sustainability dimensions including environment, social, and economic. The decisional paradigm consists of three decision-making levels in an organisation including strategic, tactical, and operational. The S-ERP framework is developed by integrating these two paradigms and unites them into one holistic structure. The breakdown of each component and level of the paradigms is identified according to the relevant literature. Concisely, this framework would be a potential guidance for practitioners to distinguish various perspectives that need to be considered for the S-ERP system implementation. The framework hopefully can assist the practitioners to mitigate the problems during the S-ERP system implementation.

Political Opposition in Turkey: An Analysis of the Oppositionist Styles of Necip Fazil Kisakurek and Nazim Hikmet Ran

Opposition culture in a society gives important clues about the socio-political structure of the country. The more a country welcomes differences in its social, political and cultural life; the more it comes close to a democratic regime. Opposition in Turkey, in its long history, has always been problematic because of the domination of statism not only in politics but also in other fields, such as social and cultural areas. In general perception of Turkey, separating from the central opinion has always been equal to chaos, which prevents the development of opposition cult in socio-political life. Supporting the refusal of opposition through some religious factors, Turkish political culture, starting with the Ottoman period, has settled such a limited understanding that it doesn’t allow an ideal form of opposition to grow. However it is known that political opposition, if practiced well, can help a political structure to renew itself, to continue development, to have a dynamic management and to reflect the preferences of people as many as possible. All these important points bring the necessity to analyse the social and political opposition culture in Turkey deeply. Therefore this study first tries to take attention to the understanding of importance of opposition culture in the eyes of politics and society. By analysing striking actors in Turkish literature Necip Fazil Kısakurek and Nazim Hikmet, the study aims to underline how the perception of opposition gave harm to political and social development of the country. By the way, this analysis reveals the need for a better understanding and practice of opposition culture for further developments in Turkey. The study starts with a general theoretical framework of opposition; in which the definition and scope of political opposition, different types and importance of opposition culture are explained. In the second part, Turkish political culture and the way it perceives the idea of opposition is revealed from a historical perspective. At the last part Kisakurek and Hikmet, who were the men of letters touching Turkish politics by their poems and proses, are analysed. Seeing similar processes of the two, who had in real completely different ideological backgrounds, the holistic structure of state mechanism against all kinds of differences is to be illustrated.

Design an intelligent real-time operation planning system in distributed manufacturing network

PurposeWith the new generation Industry 4.0 coming, as well as globalization and outsourcing, products are fabricated by different parties in the distributed manufacturing network and enterprises face the challenge of consistent planning of semi-finished product in each manufacturing process in different geographical locations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a real-time operation planning system in the distributed manufacturing network to intelligently control/plan the manufacturing networks.Design/methodology/approachThe feature of the proposed system is to model and simulate large distributed manufacturing networks to streamline the mechanical and production engineering processes with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which can keep track of process variants. To deal with concurrency and synchronization, the hierarchical timed colored Petri net (HTCPN) formalism for modeling is selected in this study. This method can help to model graphically and test the discrete events of concurrent operations. Fuzzy inference system can help for knowledge representation, so as to provide knowledge-based decision assistance in distributed manufacturing environment.FindingsIn this proposed system, there are two main sub-systems: one is the real-time modeling system, and the other one is intelligent operation planning system. These two systems are not parallel in the whole systems while the intelligent operation planning system should be embedded in any stage of the real-time modeling system as needed. That means real time modeling system provides the holistic structure of the studied distributed manufacturing system and realize real-time data transfer and information exchange. At the same time the embedded intelligent operation planning system fulfill operation plan function.Originality/valueThis new intelligent real-time operation system realizes real-time modeling with RFID-based HTCPN and smart fuzzy engine to fulfill intelligent operation planning which is highly desirable in the environment of Industry 4.0. The new intelligent manufacturing architecture will highly reduce the traditional planning workload and improve the planning results without manual error interference. The new system has been applied in a practical case to demonstrate its feasibility.

Fungal Inspired Textile Design (FITeD) for Sustainably – Cyclable – Biomimicry: A Case Study of Synthetic Fiber Reuse and Application

Most designers and product developers, especially those working by principles of biomimicry, are yet to integrate both sustainable materials and processes in their works. Where materials are sustainable, processes of production are often not, and vice versa. In an attempt to fill this gap, selected fungi species were investigated as focus for exploration; viewing their holistic structure - the mycelia, otherwise known as the roots and the more obvious fruiting body found seasonally above the ground- and their function in the ecosystem. Two concepts have evolved from this exploration. (1) The decomposing/recycling ability of fungi mycelia, even in environments with limited resources, has led to the development of an approach to optimizing textile wastes, by a method developed from an existing technique, to produce new fabrics from synthetic fibers at their end use phase. This method derived from free- form machine embroidery techniques, delivers a short fiber to fabric chain of production. (2) The intricate structural characteristics of the fruiting body of the mushrooms served as basis for abstracted 2D and 3D designs, utilized to impart tactically and to implement the bespoke method for sustainable textile production described in this research. In addition, the materials and processes employed were aimed at reducing further adverse impacts on the environment to ensure continuous use-re-use, or “cyclability”, of products. Some outcomes of this research are presented here, comprising mainly of small textile samples that have potential applications in customized garment production, accessories, or interior furnishings. The goal of the study presented is to propose an integrative approach to sustainable textile design to encourage biomimicry, such that textile designs and their respective derived products incorporate as much as possible, sustainable materials and sustainable production processes, analogous to that obtainable in nature. As such, the paper positions future research in this area.

Relationship Between Flow and Athletic Identity: The Case of Three Elite Sportsmen

ABSTRACTThis study analyzes the personal narrative of flow experiences across three elite sportsmen within their particular sport autobiographical contexts. Using a holistic formal structure analysis to examine the participants’ self-narratives, five major themes emerged: (a) early socialization as the basis of a strong athletic identity, (b) withdrawal from sports as a threat to athletic identity, (c) the dramatic weight of the narrative plots within which the experiences of flow are inserted, (d) biographical sporting flow accounts, and (e) silences and devaluations in flow narrative. The results of the narrative analyses show a close relationship between the flow experiences and athletic identity. This study concludes that, in this case, the narratives of flow experiences have had an ontological role as they served to assert the participants’ threatened athletic identity. Hence, studying narratives as practices is a useful way to better understand not only the internal coherence of the narrative fragments into which flow experiences are inserted, but also the role that they play regarding the autobiographical narrative into which these are inserted.

Mainland Chinese students⿿ conceptions of learning science: A phenomenographic study in Hebei and Shandong Provinces

Mainland China has over 100 million secondary students and they are successful in international science comparisons. However, there is little empirical research into Mainland Chinese students⿿ conceptions of science learning. The study analyzed data provided by ninety-six students from ten secondary schools in two provinces in northern China. Seven categories of conceptions of learning science emerged from the phenomenographic analysis: ⿿listening to the teacher,⿿ ⿿attending to exams,⿿ ⿿memorizing,⿿ ⿿understanding,⿿ ⿿doing problems,⿿ ⿿hard work,⿿ and ⿿improving oneself.⿿ Three of the seven categories, i.e., ⿿listening to the teacher,⿿ ⿿attending to exams,⿿ and ⿿hard work,⿿ are not found in the literature of conceptions of learning. These three categories of conceptions of learning are reflections of Confucian heritage Chinese culture that values hard work, advocates respect for teachers, and that holds a long history of imperial examinations. The outcome space of the conceptions of learning is proposed as a holistic structure in which the seven categories of conceptions of learning share equivalent positions. This is in contrast to the hierarchical structures commonly found in the literature. The variation in conceiving science learning among the participants resides in the two or more sub-categories of each of the seven categories. The implications for educational reform and school practices are discussed.

Terrorism as a Strategic Communication Phenomenon

At present, terrorism is still an ambiguous concept. The multiplicity of types and causes of terrorism is often neglected because of the similarity in the aftermath of terrorist acts. In addition, as ‘terrorism’ continues to reinvent itself, its ever-changing nature persists in puzzling academics around the world. Nevertheless, there are some common themes which have outlined the directions for terrorism research over the last decades. Most of them are applicable to particular aspects of the phenomenon rather than its holistic structure due to limitations, partly described above. In an attempt to present ‘terrorism’ as fully as possible, the present work focuses on its specifics as a communication approach. Through a detailed analysis of theoretical work and a comparative analysis of case study materials, the article demonstrates significant benefits in perceiving terrorism as a strategic communication concept. The positives of placing the phenomenon within this framework include, but are not limited to, the opportunity to examine the role of different actors, define their positions and aspirations, and account for both the rational and emotional aspects of their behavior. Using a classical set of tools for analyzing a communication process, the research provides a new approach towards understanding and countering terrorists’ activity in the future.

Free-hand sketch recognition by multi-kernel feature learning

Free-hand sketch recognition has become increasingly popular due to the recent expansion of portable touchscreen devices. However, the problem is non-trivial due to the complexity of internal structures that leads to intra-class variations, coupled with the sparsity in visual cues that results in inter-class ambiguities. In order to address the structural complexity, a novel structured representation for sketches is proposed to capture the holistic structure of a sketch. Moreover, to overcome the visual cue sparsity problem and therefore achieve state-of-the-art recognition performance, we propose a Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) framework for sketch recognition, fusing several features common to sketches. We evaluate the performance of all the proposed techniques on the most diverse sketch dataset to date (Mathias et al., 2012), and offer detailed and systematic analyses of the performance of different features and representations, including a breakdown by sketch-super-category. Finally, we investigate the use of attributes as a high-level feature for sketches and show how this complements low-level features for improving recognition performance under the MKL framework, and consequently explore novel applications such as attribute-based retrieval.

Modular localization and the holistic structure of causal quantum theory, a historical perspective

Recent insights into the conceptual structure of localization in QFT (modular localization) led to clarifications of old unsolved problems. The oldest one is the Einstein–Jordan conundrum which led Jordan in 1925 to the discovery of quantum field theory. This comparison of fluctuations in subsystems of heat bath systems (Einstein) with those resulting from the restriction of the QFT vacuum state to an open subvolume (Jordan) leads to a perfect analogy; the globally pure vacuum state becomes upon local restriction a strongly impure KMS state. This phenomenon of localization-caused thermal behavior as well as the vacuum-polarization clouds at the causal boundary of the localization region places localization in QFT into a sharp contrast with quantum mechanics and justifies the attribute “holstic”. In fact it positions the E–J Gedankenexperiment into the same conceptual category as the cosmological constant problem and the Unruh Gedankenexperiment. The holistic structure of QFT resulting from “modular localization” also leads to a revision of the conceptual origin of the crucial crossing property which entered particle theory at the time of the bootstrap S-matrix approach but suffered from incorrect use in the S-matrix settings of the dual model and string theory.The new holistic point of view, which strengthens the autonomous aspect of QFT, also comes with new messages for gauge theory by exposing the clash between Hilbert space structure and localization and presenting alternative solutions based on the use of stringlocal fields in Hilbert space. Among other things this leads to a reformulation of the Englert–Higgs symmetry breaking mechanism.

Diagnozowanie sprawności mówienia w perspektywie (nie tylko) egzaminu maturalnego

The article discusses the difficulties of diagnosing speaking skills in the situation of matriculation examination, resulting from the specific nature of spoken language varieties and texts implementation in these variants. Factors that should be taken into account when formulating criteria for assessing speech and conversation exams are: complex and holistic structure of spoken speech, transience of audible text, the spontaneity of live speech, the power of nonverbal codes, a significant stigma of a dialog, and the influence of situational context on the course of communicative interaction. The analysis of speaking skills assessment tools prepared for the oral ex­amination in the year 2015 revealed that some of them had a significant impact on the criteria developed for this purpose.

Later-Life Crisis: Towards a Holistic Model

Crisis episodes have been most commonly associated with midlife, and correspondingly research on crisis after midlife is marked by its absence. Here, we report findings from a retrospective interview-based study of 21 adults about crises occurring between the ages of 60 and 69, in the first attempt to explore the holistic structure, process and experiential contents of later-life crisis. Basing our analysis on existing models of late-adult development, four key areas of later-life crisis were explored as follows: (1) life events and relationships, (2) self and identity, (3) motivation and goals and (4) cognition and affect. We were able to define a provisional common holistic process to later-life crisis episodes, shared by all participants, which included multiple loss-inducing stressful life events that provide a cumulative challenge to coping resources, a struggle with ego integrity, increased mortality awareness and the re-scaling of goals, activities and roles in ways that pertain to re-engagement, continuity or disengagement. Findings are discussed in relation to theories of adult development in later life, while strategies are proposed for future research on this understudied area.