The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships among life satisfaction, status inconsistency, marital status, sex, race, and age. Status inconsistency is determined through a comparison of the status indicators of education, occupation, and income. Life satisfaction is determined by the responses to five areas of satisfaction which are presented in the 1976 General Social Survey conducted annually by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The five satisfaction variables are factor analyzed to assure the appropriateness of their use in the construction of the life satisfaction index. Analysis of the data consists of the use of chi-squares, Cramer's V, and Kendall's tau-b. Findings are reported and suggestions are presented for future research.

Much research relating to children and death has focused on the age-graded developmental model originally proposed by Nagy in the late 1940s. Children are alleged to pass from an infantile to a mature view, seeing death first as separation, then as the result of intervention by a supernatural being, and finally as an irreversible biological process. Accepted theory for thirty years, scholars have since noted difficulty in duplicating Nagy's findings and have come to question the universal application of the developmental model. Bluebond-Langner proposes an alternative model in which all views of death are present in all stages of development. She maintains that the particular orientation a child displays is a result of personal and social experiences.