Considering the important role that paid support workers play in care of older people with dementia, it is vital that researchers and relevant organisations understand the factors that lead to them feeling valued for the work that they do, and the consequences of such valuing (or lack thereof). The current study employed semi-structured interviews to understand the individual experiences of 15 support workers based both in residential care homes and private homes. The General Inductive Approach was used to analyse the interview transcriptions and to develop a conceptual model that describes the conditions that lead to support workers feeling valued for the work that they do. This model consists of organisational or individual strategies, the context in which support work takes place, and various interactions, actions and intervening conditions that facilitate or prevent support workers feeling valued. A significant finding in this research was the role of interpersonal relationships and interactions which underlie all other aspects of the conceptual model developed here. By understanding the importance of how employers, families of older adults with dementia and peers interact with support workers, we may promote not only the quality of work that support workers deliver, but also the wellbeing of the support workers themselves.

Little is known about the effects of informal care-giving on employees' absenteeism due to illness. This paper therefore provides a longitudinal analysis of the consequences of taking on informal care-giving for men's and women's working hours and workplace absenteeism due to illness. Data were taken from the Dutch Labour Supply Panel (waves 2004–2018); 495 of the 6,452 male observations in this panel and 696 of the 5,961 female observations had taken on informal care-giving. It was tested whether respondents who became (intensive) informal carers were more likely than respondents who remained non-care-givers to reduce their work hours or stop working between waves t and t1, or to be absent from work due to illness in wave t1. (Multinomial) logistic regression analyses showed that taking on informal care reduced women's working hours when the care they provided was intensive, but not men's. The predicted probability of women reducing their work hours was 12 per cent if they had remained non-care-givers between waves t and t1, 15 per cent if they had started giving non-intensive care and 19 per cent if they had begun providing intensive help. In addition, starting to provide (non-intensive) informal care increased the risk of workplace absenteeism among both women and men. The study highlights the need for workplace policies that prevent female carers from reducing their work hours, and enable male and female carers to continue working in a healthy way.

Age-related changes shape social connectedness, isolation and loneliness among older adults. Ageing often accompanies decisions about ageing in place or moving (i.e. senior living facility). Scant research compares these two living arrangements and even sparser research focuses on older women. This study, thus, poses the following questions: How do older women (aged 75+ years) experience social connectedness and perceived isolation? How does this experience vary between older women living alone in private homes and those living in assisted living facilities? Data include semi-structured interviews with women aged 75+ years who live alone in a private home or in an assisted living facility (N = 16). Findings revealed differences in three aspects of social connectedness: interactions, relationships and belonging. Private home participants' interactions underscored intentionality, with minimal investment in forging new or deeper relationships and an emphasis on belonging to the world through awareness, contribution and cognitive ability. The experiences of participants living in assisted living were characterised by availability of interactions and casual relationships. They emphasised belonging to the facility community, while positioning themselves between the status of resident and staff. Surprisingly, most participants in both groups did not express feelings of perceived isolation. Both had adapted their social connectedness expectations to reflect their current situation.

Health authorities worldwide address older adults as a risk group for more serious illness and health complications associated with COVID-19, while social gerontologists have warned that addressing older adults as a risk group of COVID-19 bears the risk of reinforcing ageism. This paper empirically explores to what extent older adults perceive themselves as part of a COVID-19 risk group and how these perceptions influence their everyday lives and experiences of age and ageing. This paper draws upon data from a mixed-methods study on older adults' risk perceptions during COVID-19 in Lower Austria, including a representative survey on 521 adults (60+ years) and data from 20 semi-structured interviews. Approximately two-thirds of the respondents consider themselves at risk of COVID-19 and name age, in addition to pre-existing illness, as a contributing factor in this risk perception. Older adults with health constraints, and especially older men, have a higher probability of perceiving risk due to COVID-19. Additionally, older adults report that they experience being ‘suddenly seen as old’ or ‘being put into a box’ during the pandemic, which influenced their experiences and images of ageing. Our study provides insights into how perceived COVID-19 risk affects the everyday lives of older adults. Age-based categorisations of risk contribute to a shift in images of age and ageing, drawing on insecurity and risk, rather than successful and active ageing, to conceptualise later life.

A large body of literature shows that the emotional health of rural elders in China is negatively affected by the migration of their adult children. However, the precise mechanism that underpins this relationship has yet to be fully uncovered. This paper introduces two new dimensions of analysis to expand the understanding of this ‘left behind’ phenomenon, and offers statistical insights, theoretical explanations and policy recommendations, as well as suggestions for further study. Firstly, in this paper, rural elders have been distinguished based on whether all, or any, of their adult children have migrated. This distinction leads to the finding that rural elders suffer more adverse mental health impacts when all adult children from a household move away. Secondly, the temporal dimension of migration is investigated, finding that there is a ‘turning point’ after which the mental health of rural elders appears to recover after the migration of their adult children. Comparison of the two groups shows that rural elders who see any of their adult children migrate recover from depression twice as quickly as those who see all of their children migrate. Receiving financial support or providing child care can only partly mediate the negative influence of migration. Also, the level of depression and wellbeing of rural elders can be significantly moderated by the emotional closeness between them and their adult children. Providing (grand)child-care assistance and receiving economic support is shown to have smaller mitigating effects. This paper concludes with a discussion of how the notion of ‘filial piety’ could, directly and indirectly, play a role in the emotional health of rural elders, with policy implications provided.

It has been argued that lifecourse transitions are transformative moments for individuals when lifestyles, habits and behaviours are potentially open to contemplation and change. Within sustainability research such ‘moments of change’ are regarded as offering potential to encourage less environmentally damaging consumption patterns. Research on consumption indicates that orientations to material goods and their affective significance are complex. Whilst sociological work understands attachment to things as integral to maintaining kinship relations, this is hard to reconcile with long-standing moral concerns about materialism and psychological research which indicates a negative relationship between the acquisition of material objects and wellbeing, and the environmental implications of acquiring and divesting ‘stuff’. Yet there has been little engagement with how older people orient to their material possessions and divestment, the implications of this for later-life wellbeing and for environmental sustainability. In this paper, we draw these different strands of work together to understand how retirees relate to their material possessions and their divestment. Drawing on serial interviews with individuals in the United Kingdom, we explore how the transition to retirement highlights the complexity of participants’ attachment to things. While some items had profound relational significance, others were experienced as troublesome. Decisions on what to divest were shaped by pragmatic considerations and levels of attachment, whilst modes of divestment were aligned with values of thrift.

Although there has been significant research on the relationship between alcohol consumption and demographic and psychological influences, this does not consider the effect of social influence among older drinkers and if these effects differ between men and women. One aspect of social influence is social capital. The aim of this paper is to examine whether relational and cognitive social capital are associated with higher or lower risk of alcohol use among adults aged 50 years or older and to assess the extent to which this relationship differs between men and women. To investigate this, data were collected from a cross-sectional questionnaire survey of adults over the age of 50 in the United Kingdom who were recruited from general practitioners. The sample consisted of 9,984 individuals whose mean age was 63.87 years. From these data, we developed proxy measures of social capital and associate these with the respondent's level of alcohol consumption as measured on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT-10) scale. In the sample, just over 20 per cent reported an increasing risk or dependency on alcohol. Using two expressions of social capital – relational (social relationships) and cognitive (knowledge acquisition and understanding) – we found that greater levels of both are associated with a reduced risk of higher drinking risk. Being female had no significant effect when combined with relational capital but did have a significant effect when combined with cognitive capital. It is argued that interventions to enhance social relations among older people and education to help understand alcohol risks would be helpful to protect older people from the damaging effects of excessive alcohol consumption.

The objective of this study was to examine the activities, motivations, and barriers of activity engagement in the oldest-old residing in assisted living facilities (ALFs). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 participants, aged 80–94 (standard deviation = 4.38), from two ALFs. Thematic analyses were used to identify and corroborate clusters of experiences. All residents stated that they desired enriching activities, most often in the form of productive work or community events. Although engaging in enriching activities was a universal desire, residents who experienced more functional limitations had an increased difficulty satisfying this need. Participants believed that activities offered by the ALF primarily served those who are cognitively impaired. ALF residents with severe mobility issues were not able to access more enriching activities outside the ALF compared to those with fewer physical limitations. However, the more physically impaired residents used a range of adaption methods that fit into the selection, optimisation, and compensation framework to overcome barriers to participate in meaningful activities. ALF residents who are cognitively fit but experience severe mobility limitations may be the most in need of enriching activities. To help these residents maintain a high quality of life, ALFs need to provide activities that appeal to residents of varying cognitive abilities and provide interventions to help aid their adaption to physical loss.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia 1997, 276pp, $29.95 cloth ISBN 0-8139-1721-2.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is one of America's foremost critics of the concept of ageing as a universal and comprehensive process of decline which begins in the middle years. She is a formidable critic of biological essentialism, defender of social constructionism, and opponent of ‘middle ageism’. Her most recent book, published in 1997 and not yet available in the UK, has been widely acclaimed in the USA. This review article describes Gullette's analysis of the social construction of decline in the context of her previous writings on midlife and outlines her strategy for combatting the decline model of ageing into old age.

Although social frailty has been described from a theoretical perspective, the lived experiences of older adults regarding social frailty are yet unknown. In this paper, we aim to (a) gain more in-depth insights into community-dwelling and assisted-living older adults’ experiences of social frailty and (b) explore the differences in these experiences between these two groups. We conduct a thematic analysis of 38 interviews with community-dwelling and assisted-living older adults in rural villages the Netherlands. We structure our findings along three overarching themes which highlight different aspects of the social frailty experiences of our participants: (a) present resources and activities to fulfil social needs, (b) resources and activities that have been lost, and (c) how they manage and adapt to changes in resources and activities over time. Loneliness is only reported among the community-dwelling participants, while the loss of mobility and participation in (social) activities is experienced most strongly by the assisted-living participants. These findings challenge the widespread policies and practices of ageing in place. We conclude that for some older adults, living in assisted arrangements is preferred over ageing in place, as doing so can prevent social frailty. The key reason for this is that life in assisted living is likely to bring about new social resources and activities, which may serve to fulfil the social needs of older adults.

Given inevitable age-related decreases in physical or mental capacity, studies on health-related behaviour (HRB) clustering in older people provide an opportunity to reduce health-care costs and promote healthy ageing. This study explores the clustering of HRBs and transition probabilities of cluster memberships over time, and compares sociodemographic characteristics of these clusters among Chinese and Japanese middle-aged and older adults. Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) from 2011 to 2015 (N = 19614) and the Japanese Study of Ageing and Retirement (JSTAR) from 2007 to 2011 (N = 7,080), Latent Transition Analysis was applied to investigate the clustering and change in clustering memberships of smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity and body mass index. Multivariate logistic regression was used to explore the sociodemographic characteristics of these longitudinal HRB cluster members. We identified four common clusters in CHARLS and JSTAR: ‘smoking’, ‘overweight or obese’, ‘healthy lifestyle’ and ‘current smoking with drinking’, and an additional cluster named ‘ex-smoking with drinking’ in JSTAR. Although HRB cluster members were largely stable in both cohorts, participants in China tended to move towards an unhealthy lifestyle, while participants in Japan did the opposite. We also found that participants who smoked and drank were more likely to be male, younger, less educated and unmarried in both cohorts, but the overweight or obese participants were female, urban and higher income in CHARLS but not JSTAR. Our study not only contributes to the knowledge of longitudinal changes in health-related behavioural clustering patterns in an Asian elderly population, but may also facilitate the design of targeted multi-behavioural interventions to promote healthy lifestyles among older people in both countries.

This analysis examines how the narrative self of a person with dementia is maintained by family members in a small rural Nova Scotian community. In the literature, the expectation is often that rurality is a condition of isolation, distance from family and limited health resources. However, drawing on three years of ethnographic and interviewing research with a large extended family whose patriarch, Alexander, is a person with dementia, we demonstrate how a community's rurality influences interpretations of dementia. In Alexander's rurality, of particular import are local definitions of belonging, which privilege intimate knowledge of local history, working as a farmer to shape the land, and being of Scottish descent and male. As family members find Alexander's belonging to come into question in their community, we show them to employ narratives in which he is valorised for continuing to uphold local values – of ‘usefulness’ and of ‘being the land’. We show how the family members must also revisit and revise these narratives when Alexander's belonging is further called into question outside the family setting and, specifically, at the local farmer's market, where Alexander is often no longer greeted by other marketgoers. The men and women of the family arrive at different interpretations of this development, with the women considering marketgoers to demean and dehumanise Alexander, while the men feel that the marketgoers are avoiding interactions that would embarrass him. Such disagreements reveal the ongoing emotional labour of creating narratives that lack closure, certainty and consensus, as well as ways in which gender and rurality operate intersectionally in the process of meaning-making.

User involvement is increasingly common in health-care research, and the ideal is user participation and influence during all research stages. Here we describe and reflect on the processes and outcomes associated with advisory group–researcher collaboration from a person-centred perspective. When planning a study in which older adults’ experiences of reablement were investigated, older adults with previous first-hand experience of reablement participated in an advisory group. We found that the fostering of healthful relationships, in which experiential and research knowledge are considered complimentary and equitable, and all members have the power to exercise their unique roles, seems to be a prerequisite for the co-creation of knowledge. Also, practical arrangements and social relationships constitute important details that are crucial to ensuring contribution from older adults with health-related conditions. While such individuals may be unable to participate during all stages of a research project, their involvement on an advisory level during the initial stages can increase study quality and relevance. Input from the advisory group members contributed to the improvement of the language in the study information sheet, improvement of the study design, development and validation of the interview guide, and insight into how the interviews should be conducted. The personal knowledge and expertise of the advisory group members, which emanated from their immediate sensitivity, contributed to the person-centredness in the study.

Whether encouraging successful ageing or labelling one as a stereotypical senior citizen, messages surrounding ageing pervade the daily lives of older adults. However, as a social status, age remains primarily in the background of older adults’ conversations, only being drawn into the focus when one is identified as older. This paper draws on interviews with members and staff of an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in the southeastern United States of America in order to examine the ways that they discuss age and ageing. These older adults’ ageing talk often focused on navigating away from negative ideas about age and avoiding labels deemed pejorative. Humour was occasionally used in identifying age, which carried potential for reinforcing as well as subverting ageism. Yet, members highlighted positive value in being older, particularly as demonstrated through participation in age-segregated education. Overall, these findings reflect the conflicting influences of deeply embedded ageist beliefs and personal desires to age successfully among this group of white, upper-middle-class, educated older adults. Ultimately, OLLI served as a protective environment for these privileged individuals, shielding the self from stereotypes otherwise present in ageing talk.

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is common and a known risk factor for social disengagement in later life. This study explored social functioning following a diagnosis of ARHL. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach we developed an interview schedule to advance a grounded theory from data collected from six older adults who used either hearing aids or cochlear implants. Interview questions concerned social functioning as well as focusing on their perspective of the impact of ARHL on cognitive functioning. We describe a grounded theory conceived as ‘Reconnecting to Others’. This theory posits that participants faced social challenges in relation to their ARHL, and resolved these challenges partly through the use of hearing aids and cochlear implantation. The theory also emphasises the importance of help from other hearing aid users for new users, and corroborates prior findings about strategies older adults with ARHL use to cope with their hearing impairment in various social situations. Once hearing aids and cochlear implants are used and adapted to with the help of peers, participants completed their journey by helping others who had received diagnoses of ARHL. Additionally, participants spoke of the pleasure of hearing again. Interestingly, no participant felt that their ARHL had impacted their cognitive functioning. Our theory provides a basis for explaining existing quantitative findings as well as creating new hypotheses for future testing.

The two movies about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012 and 2015) were directed by John Madden. Starring a cast of famous British older actors, the narratives are set in a faded hotel in India. These are individuals who have relocated because their retirement dreams cannot be realised in their home country. They reflect the growing phenomenon of international retirement migration (IRM): the quickly growing upsurge of financially independent individuals seeking an affordable old age. In India they can claim a position of relative comfort and privilege. For a generation that grew up in a consumerist culture, upward mobility in the senior life stage has become a purchasable commodity through exodus to a developing country. This generation of retirees is generally in better health compared with prior seniors, with a longer life expectancy. Many have a background of travel experience, and an ethos that places their own pleasures in life as pivotal. While global numbers are unavailable, it is estimated that there are millions of retirees relocating to less-developed countries for an affordable retirement. At retirement locations such as the Marigold Hotel, the discrepancies that continue between nations, and local poverty, enable this practice. The events in these movies might be read as a recapitulation of imperialism expressed through retirement migration.

Current literature on the over use of psychoactive drugs by elderly people suggests that alienation, poverty, rolelessness and lack of drug experience in earlier life are principal causes. But these are mainly empirical observations which have not been ordered into any theoretical framework. In proposing the applicability of the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ as a mode of explanation, the paper presents a survey of drug use prevalence as a basis for later conceptual analysis. It is concluded that drug misuse is an institutionalized response which perpetuates dependency.

This article addresses the subject of the role of older women in nineteenth-century North America. Existing historical accounts of the lives and position of older women in Canada and north-eastern USA are both partial and flawed, focusing mainly upon negative images of older women in poverty or in subjugated, passive domestic roles. These images of women's roles are based upon nineteenth-century guides and manuals which tended to portray later life as bleak, unfulfilling and restricted. However, through an examination of diaries and other biographical material describing the everyday lives of middle class women, contrasting evidence emerges of active and powerful roles and positive views of later life. It is argued that the examples discussed are not exceptional cases but rather are representative of a wider nineteenth-century pattern of older women undertaking satisfying and vital social roles within their family and community networks.

The living arrangements of older people are changing. An analysis of official registration data (1993–1998) in Flanders, Belgium, shows that while the number of single person households has been increasing, the proportion of people aged 75 or more years living alone has been falling and the proportion living with a spouse or partner increasing. No less than one third of the older people who lived alone in 1993 sustain a one-person household into very old age. It was also found that those who are widowed at a very advanced age change house or move very quickly, women to a greater extent and at younger ages than men. The principal destinations are residential care homes and, to a lesser extent, child's households. Living alone appears to be a decreasingly acceptable option. Since very old people with a disability appear to have an increasing preference for residential care and a lessening preference for co-residence with relatives, these developments have consequences for both informal family care and public social services. Particular attention needs to be paid to men who live alone as a risk-group, and residential care provision requires expansion.