The demand for residential care by older people is increasing in Beijing as a result of dramatic demographic and socio-economic transformations. Little is known about the way older people access residential care in the context of Beijing. In this research, qualitative data collected from 46 in-depth semi-structured interviews with residential care facility (RCF) managers, older residents, and their family members in six RCFs in Beijing were transcribed and analysed using the constant comparative method. The findings included the following themes: access to residential care as geographical access, information access, economic access, socio-cultural access, and the socio-managerial environment. Geographical access is influenced by location, distance, and the micro-physical environment and amenities of RCFs. Information access refers to the capability to acquire related information on available resources. Economic access is the financial affordability for the resources. Socio-cultural access is affected by individual attitudes and aggregative cultural values on ageing and care of older people. Additionally, the social-managerial environment such as reputations of RCFs, quality of services, and management mechanisms are also important to the decision-making process. All these factors influence older people and their family members’ decision-making process of which RCF to choose. The research provides a multi-perspective analysis of access to residential care and suggestions on improving the accessibility of residential care for older people in Beijing.

Social gerontologists have long grappled with the meaning of ‘community’ to older people. This paper lies within this tradition and focuses on the extent to which the past emphasis upon communities of place needs to be rebalanced or rethought in the light of emerging evidence for the growing engagement of older people in communities of interest linked to friendships, enthusiasms and their increasing spending power. This theoretical paper highlights the traditional emphasis on the role of community and place in later life and explores the emergence of a debate about communities of interest linked to such factors as the ‘discovery’ of ‘the Third Age’, marketisation, consumerism, the importance of social interaction in the lives of many older people, and the impact of the internet and virtual communities. This debate is placed in an international policy context in which numerous governments are concerned about the greying of the global population and the consequent desire to promote ‘ageing well’ to offset resultant health and social care costs. The paper argues for a reconceptualisation of community through a more sophisticated view of ‘place’ and ‘interest’ that avoids false dichotomies between the two and acknowledges the impact of social, economic and cultural change upon the lives of older people.

Older consumers have long been the ‘invisible majority’ in advertising despite the rapid increase in an ageing population. A significant proportion of this population have high levels of disposable income, even in times of recession, but advertisers are not encouraging them to part with it. This paper intends to find out why advertisers have been slow or struggle to target older consumers effectively. The aims of this study are two-fold. First, it explores the portrayal and representation of older consumers in Tesco's ‘Dotty’ campaign and Marks & Spencer's (M&S) ‘Twiggy’ campaign, with special reference to the use of celebrities. The second aim is to demonstrate how the focus has shifted from the more traditional, negative stereotyping (Tesco campaign) to a more progressive approach, presenting aspirational images that older consumers can identify with (M&S campaign). Although both campaigns were effective in terms of increasing profits, this paper suggests that the ongoing M&S example of using older celebrities in advertising campaigns demonstrates a more effective creative strategy that is in tune not only with a growing population of older consumers but is also especially applicable in times of economic uncertainty.

Based on in-depth interviews with middle-class Korean professional sojourner migrant married couples in Singapore and their elderly parents, this paper examines how the cultural meaning and social practice of filial co-habitation and support have been transformed in an international migration context. Transnational co-residence and visiting among these families are examined and a differentiated and patterned organisation of support by sons versus daughters for their own elderly parents is demonstrated. Although the immigration regulations and co-ethnic community environments for older Koreans in Singapore pose a challenge to elderly parents, the family remains the most important nexus of care and support. By adopting ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ co-residence strategies and deploying multi-purpose long-term visits by wives and children in Singapore to their elderly parents in Korea, and by remitting regular financial contributions, these families are able to maintain the cultural ideal of filial co-residence and support. However, the gendered traditional co-habitation ideal differentiates between actual and virtual co-residence. The actual co-residence pattern was mainly adopted by first sons/daughters-in-law couples and the elderly parents of the first sons, whereas the virtual co-residence pattern was mainly adopted by sons-in-law/daughters couples and the elderly parents of daughters. These results show that patterned two-way transnational mobility for providing care and support is shaped by cultural norms and the practical negotiation of family obligations.

We suggest two supplements to Franco Modigliani's lifecycle model in order to explain why people who have retired from paid work choose either to start volunteering or increase the amount of time they devote to volunteer work. First, total consumption consists of both the material and immaterial products of work. While people can save their income in order to maintain an even level of material consumption, they unable to save a portion of the immaterial product. Second, at the statutory retirement age people retire only from paid work. We argue that older people substitute paid work for volunteering due to their inherent need to maintain immaterial consumption during retirement.

Within the growing body of interdisciplinary work on ageing, more attention is now paid to literary engagement with and representations of ageing, often in the form of literary gerontology. This field locates literature as part of the cultural discourses around ageing in our society. Pat Barker's work, already the subject of some gerontological attention, is important here, because her texts offer detailed representations of the ageing subject, and engage with the often disturbing challenges that ageing presents to self and social identity. This paper considers three of Pat Barker's novels –Another World (1999), Liza's England (1986/1996), and Union Street (1982) – within one of the central debates in ageing studies: how far we are aged by culture and where culture might meet the material. In these novels, ageing characters are clearly at the mercy of cultural constructions of age; nevertheless, the texts also insist on the centrality of the body, forcefully reminding us of the limits of cultural ageing. This paper argues that these novels explore the interplay between cultural and corporeal ageing, forcing the reader to acknowledge the complexities of, and unsettle any easy assumptions about, ageing subjectivity. In the process, this suggests that what fiction can offer to gerontology is, at least in part, an exploration of the ineluctability of ‘contradictions’ when it comes to ageing.

Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 35 men and women aged 73–91, this article examines the ways in which older adults with multiple chronic conditions talk about and prepare for death and dying. While the focus of the original study did not include questions concerning the end-of-life, the majority of our participants made unprompted remarks regarding their own and others' mortality. The participants discussed the prevalence of death in their lives as it related to the passing of significant others, as well as their own eventual demise. Additionally, the men and women expressed hopes and fears about their impending death, in particular with respect to prolonged pain and suffering, institutionalisation, and a loss of mental acuity and independence. Many of our participants also described their end-of-life plans, which included making funeral arrangements, obtaining living wills, and planning their suicides. They further reported a number of barriers to their planning for death, including a lack of willingness on the part of family members to discuss their wishes as well as a scarcity of institutional resources and support. We discuss our findings in relation to the extant research concerning older adults' experiences of death and dying, as well as Glaser and Strauss' (1971) theory of status passage and Marshall's (1986) conceptualisation of authorship and the legitimation of death.

Studies of the relationship between retirement and subsequent health, including longevity, have produced mixed findings. One reason may be that these studies have not taken attitudes toward retirement into account. In the current study we examined whether attitudes toward retirement can impact longevity. The cohort consisted of 394 participants who were followed for 23 years. As predicted, participants with positive attitudes toward retirement at the start of the study lived significantly longer than those with negative attitudes toward retirement. The positive attitudes-toward-retirement group had a median survival advantage of 4.9 years. This survival advantage remained after controlling for relevant covariates, including age, functional health, socio-economic status, and whether employed or retired. Our findings suggest that psychological planning for retirement is as important as the more traditional forms of planning.

As in other ageing populations, dementia, musculoskeletal conditions and cardiovascular disease affect a high proportion of Australians aged over 65 years, and the prevalence of these conditions increases significantly with age. People with these conditions may need to access a range of care services over time to enable them to remain living in their homes. Many eventually need to move into a nursing home.

In contrast to the considerable recent literature on the funding of long-term care systems for population ageing, studies on the care pathways followed by individuals are much less common. This paper explores the effect of disease on use of community care services and nursing homes over time, focusing on people with dementia, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal conditions. Care-use transitions are identified using linked administrative client data for a cohort of 33,300 community-living Australians who had an aged care assessment in 2003-04 and who had not previously used aged care services.

The different symptoms and courses of diseases meant that the patterns of aged care service use, both in terms of care services accessed and the timing of this access, varied considerably for people with different health conditions. These differences persisted across a range of client characteristics. In particular, people with dementia or cerebrovascular disease as their main health condition were more likely to enter nursing home care than those with heart disease or musculoskeletal conditions.

The variation in use of aged care services according to disease group need to be taken into account in any projections of demand for aged care. Such projections must allow for predictions of disease prevalence, or else they will yield inaccurate predictions of demand for both community and residential care.