This study examines social ties within a community of retirement residents to examine how health influences patterns of social interaction. Drawing from a social fields perspective, I anticipated that health would emerge as a key form of status. I hypothesised that this would manifest in the healthiest residents receiving a disproportionate share of social tie nominations, and that the network would be characterised by distinct patterns of health-based sorting. Exponential random graph models were used to disentangle individual, dyadic and higher-order influences on reports of interaction. Findings support the main hypotheses, pointing to the importance of health as a basis of micro-level social structure in contexts where it is a scarce and valued resource. I urge further research to trace out these implications in other unique settings.

The ageing of Third World populations and its implications for planning in social welfare has received little attention in the literature until now. This article explores the need radically to alter Western models of care for elderly people in an African context, arguing that in situations of mass poverty and gross economic differentiation a concentration on social welfare for urban formal sector employees is inappropriate. Zimbabwe is used as a case study. The situation of the aged in Zimbabwe is analysed from existing but scanty data, and sets of policy proposals that have relevance to the national economy and to the rural, urban and commercial farming sectors are discussed.

To cope with an increased proportion of older workers, organisations develop old-age adaptation policies. Two strategies underlie these policies: phasing out and activating. Although the existence of these strategies is widely recognised, the reasons for their presence have rarely been explored. We identify three arguments that explain the extent to which these strategies are present: profit, principles and pressures. We hypothesise that the intensity of the phasing out strategy is higher when it is profitable and easy to replace older workers, when employer's age norms support the principle of treating older workers differently, and when external pressures are high. We also hypothesise that the intensity of the activating strategy is higher when it is profitable but hard to replace older workers, when the employer's age norms reject the principle of treating older workers differently, and when external pressures are high. We use pooled regression analysis to study imputed managerial data from 5,410 organisations in seven European countries. Results confirm the importance of external pressures for the adaptation of both strategies, and of principles for activating. Although policy feasibility is important for the adaption of both strategies, the other profit variables showed mixed results. Net benefits of older workers to the organisation are only important for phasing out, and substitutability only for activating. This paper discusses the wider implications of the study.

Although the socio-economic and structural contexts of retirement have been the subject of previous research, few studies state explicitly how societal ageism and structural constraints obstruct retired persons' choices or options available in post-retirement life. This study attempts to contribute to the literature of ageing, retirement, and wellbeing in later life in general, by providing real examples of ageism around the time of retirement as structural constraints of old persons. It also illustrates how they consequently reduce the choices of retired persons, and in turn affect their later life. The study draws on data from interviews with 34 retirees aged in their late fifties and sixties in Korea. Within the socio-economic context of ageism around the time of retirement, four options/strategies appear to be available; namely reconciling, complaining and not knowing what to do, finding roles in other activities, and disengaging. Older persons' decisions to continue to work after retirement are often reconciling ones, that is, taken within a context of limited choice and control. Permanent leavers' decisions not to work are also influenced by the limited quality of work available in the labour market. The study concludes by arguing that policies for older persons should take into consideration their diverse expectations and aspirations for their later life, but, at the same time, should remain aware of their constraints within socio-economic contexts.

This study analyses the development of the economic wellbeing of Swedes aged 65 years and older from 1990. This period was characterised by Sweden's deepest and most prolonged recession since the Great Depression, but was then followed by buoyant growth. In a series of interventions from 1991 through to 1998, pensions were cut and their full price indexation abandoned. In spite of these dramatic measures, this study shows that pensioners fared better than the working-age population, but also that poverty among older Swedes increased in absolute terms. During the following years of rapid economic growth, in contrast, the growth in pensioners' income fell behind that of workers and their relative poverty increased. The analysis shows that the limited resources of many older Swedes put them close to a social poverty line. The study also shows that income inequality among older Swedes has grown with the increasing importance of capital income for the better off. We conclude that the increasing gap between better-off and worse-off older people raises issues about the future provision of expenditures on public services for them. The paper concludes that, overall, poverty among older people in Sweden remains low by international standards and that the Swedish welfare state has maintained its resilience.

People with learning difficulties are now surviving into old age and more and more of them are being resettled from long-stay hospitals. The main purpose of this article is to examine some of the key barriers facing, and dilemmas involved in, the provision of community-based services to this newly emerging user group. The findings of some recent field research on older people with learning difficulties who have been resettled into the community are used to illustrate the challenges facing service providers. Particular reference is made to the impact of age discrimination and traditional differences between service specialisms. The article shows that both official definitions of need in old age and the aspirations of the service responses to those needs have been artificially constructed in very narrow terms, especially when compared with the principled approach to service provision for younger people with learning difficulties. In conclusion, therefore, it is argued that the principles underpinning services for people with learning difficulties, such as normalisation, should be applied to older people as well.

This paper proposes a methodology for measuring poverty among people aged 60 years or more and living alone in Hong Kong. It uses a lifestyle approach and is based on an index of subjective perceptions of deprivation consisting of 79 indicators. These cover the main expenditure categories of single elders in Hong Kong: housing, food, clothing, durable goods, fuel and water, entertainment and social activities, medical care and transport. We tentatively identify a poverty threshold of HK $7,000 per month in regard to these expenditure categories. With incomes below $6,000, respondents reduce spending on miscellaneous items and, at incomes of $5,000, they reduce spending on clothing, entertainment and social activities and transport. At incomes below $4,000, they cut down on food, durable goods, and fuel and water expenditure. As incomes drop below $4,000, respondents are forced to cut to a significant degree the ‘necessities’ of life, in particular food, to make ends meet. Despite this, levels of transfer payments to Hong Kong's eligible single elders are currently below this amount. It is noteworthy that respondents do not reduce housing, medical care, services and ‘other’ expenses when their incomes are below $7,000 per month. We conclude that Hong Kong's status as a ‘tiger welfare regime’, and in particular its relatively comprehensive provision of public housing and health care, helps to explain this finding.

Whether life is spent in good health or disability has a critical influence on the use of health-care services. It is also known that average healthy life expectancy differs by sex. This paper reports estimations of healthy and unhealthy life expectancy in old age using self-reported health assessments for the City of São Paulo, Brazil in 2000–01. The data derived from the Health, Well-being and Aging in Latin America and the Caribbean Project (SABE), and from population censuses and mortality statistics. Sullivan's estimation method was used. It combines the age-specific schedule of the current probabilities of death with the prevalence of self-perceived ‘poor’ and ‘good’ health. The paper also reports multivariate analyses of the factors associated with variations by age group and sex in self-perceived health. The findings revealed that, at all ages, women live longer than men and for more years in a healthy state. Among men, those aged 60, 65 and 70 years were expected to live a higher percentage of their remaining life than women in a healthy state, but among those aged 75, 80 and 85 years, the opposite held. Among women, the percentage of remaining years that were unhealthy did not increase as age increased, which differs from previous findings. The multivariate analyses showed that with increasing age, for women the number of chronic diseases decreased but dependency increased, and for men the opposite held. This finding indicated that the percentage of life spent in poor self-perceived health more accurately predicts mortality in men than women.

Research on care managers' experiences of the needs assessment process is scarce even though the literature on needs assessment practice is relatively extensive. One of the research areas that has not received attention yet is the way in which care managers experience the challenges that are presumably posed by increased ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity among prospective elder care recipients. This article addresses this research gap. It is based on a project that aims to shed light on care managers' experiences of the needs assessment process in general and cross-cultural needs assessment meetings in particular. The data are constituted of focus group interviews with care managers in Sweden (N=60). In this article we focus on care managers' experiences of needs assessment with older people who have immigrated late-in-life, who come from cultures considered different from the Swedish one and who have not mastered the Swedish language. This was the group of older people that the care managers mostly thought of when asked to describe their experiences of cross-cultural needs assessment meetings. The interviewed care managers discussed the challenges that these meetings present, which were related to communication due to language barriers, different demands and expectations, insecurity regarding what is customary in such meetings, as well as perceived passivity among late-in-life immigrants. The article discusses the contributions of the findings to research on care management practices in general, as well as to needs assessment practice in particular.

Worldwide, populations are ageing and consequently so are the consumer profiles for most organisations. Understanding how best to ensure satisfaction in interactions with older customers, patients, members of organisations, and so on is therefore increasingly important. This paper examines two research questions: (a) How satisfied or dissatisfied are older people with their customer service experience, and what are the factors associated with dissatisfaction? and (b) What prompts older people to want to change service providers? The research questions are addressed using a mixed-methods approach – quantitative analysis of observation logs, supported by illustrative quotes from focus groups. We find that on the whole older people are generally satisfied with their interactions with organisations, although a substantial minority of interactions lead to dissatisfaction or lower-than-expected satisfaction. Dissatisfaction with interactions is mostly associated with impersonal communications, including interactions that are not conducted face to face, and those that are one-off interactions rather than repeated interactions. Media and communications firms prompted the greatest levels of dissatisfaction among older consumers. Dissatisfied older consumers from our sample are more than 12 times more likely to report an intention to switch providers than satisfied consumers. This highlights the potential costs to organisations of poor customer interactions with older people.

Culturally, institutional care has been seen to strip older people of their status as full adult members of society and turn them into ‘have-nots’ in terms of agency. The substantial emphasis in gerontology of measuring the activity and functional ability of the elderly has unintentionally fostered these stereotypes, as have traditional definitions of agency that emphasise individuals’ choices and capacities. The aim of this paper is to discover what kind of opportunities to feel agentic exist for people who have reduced functional abilities and therefore reside in assisted living. In this paper, agency is approached empirically from the viewpoint of Finnish sheltered housing residents. The data were gathered using participant observation and thematic interviews. This study suggests that even people with substantial declines in their functional abilities may feel more or less agentic depending on their functional and material surroundings and the support they receive from the staff, relatives and other residents. The perception that residents’ agency in assisted living cannot be reduced to measurable activity has methodological implications for gerontological research on agency. Care providers can utilise our findings in reasserting their residents’ quality of life.

Data on a nationally representative sample of ever-married white American women born in 1900–1910 show living arrangements to be closely associated with the quality of the ageing experience (with, that is, whether these women were ageing ‘successfully’). The proportions ageing ‘successfully’ were highest among those living only with their husbands, and lowest among those living with kin other than their husbands. In between, but much closer in position to the women living only with their husbands, were those who were living alone. The paper looks at explanations accounting for these differences and considers some of the policy implications of these findings.

This paper poses an epistemological challenge to students and researchers of old age. It argues that people in deep old age are a testimony to the failure to generate a language by which to comprehend extra-cultural phenomena, which aborts a meaningful dialogue between researchers and subjects. The arguments put forward are based on an analysis of the unique position of the very old as an ultimate, unconstructable ‘other’, as they appear in the relevant anthropological discourse, and maintains that cultural standing of that category is anchored in a symbolic and existential space that prevents communication with its inhabitants. The social processes that lead to this state of absent translation and a deadlock of interpretation are analysed by using examples a longitudinal study of the oldest old conducted by the Herczeg Institute on Aging in Israel. An alternative option for a new conceptual articulation of ways of understanding ageing is proposed; one that is free of conventional but ineffectual paradigms.

The Sociology and Social Policy Research Unit of the Berlin Aging Study focuses on four substantive areas: (1) life course antecedents and generational experiences, (2) later phases of the family life course, (3) action resources and social participation, and (4) economic situations and the provision of care. This paper reports results on the relationship between social and economic inequality and differential ageing, using the BASE multidisciplinary Intake Assessment (N = 360). The socio-economic position of older people is measured along three dimensions: economic resources, social status and prestige, and cultural status. Several ageing outcomes are considered, including functional physical health, cognitive functioning and mental health, overall subjective well-being, social autonomy and dependency. First, we show that old people as a group are neither socially nor economically homogeneous: very old women possess unusually low economic resources; and cohort differences in educational attainment are carried into old age. Second, cognitive functioning and mental health are positively correlated with socio-economic resources, while functional physical health is not. For women, socio-economic resources slightly affect overall subjective well-being, and are linked to the likelihood of living in a nursing home. We speculate that the wide availability of compulsory health insurance reduces social differentials in physical health and that these inequalities may determine who survives into old age.

In an increasingly ageing society, its older members are receiving considerable political and policy attention. However, much remains to be learnt about public perceptions of older age, particularly the views and experiences of older individuals themselves. Drawing on qualitative interviews carried out with members of two British cohorts (N = 60) who have reached the ‘third age’, this paper discusses perceptions of age, focusing particularly on how perceived advantages and disadvantages differ by respondents' self-reported physical capability. The interviews were carried out in 2010 as part of the HALCyon (Healthy Ageing across the Life Course) collaborative research programme. Findings suggest there is some difference in the way older people view aspects of ageing by capability and that although advantages are widely perceived, physical decline and associated health concerns were the overwhelming theme across the conversations. The article concludes by making tentative suggestions to inform the positive ageing agenda and its related policies.

This paper presents data from two studies of support networks conducted in North Wales and Northern Ireland. Five types of support networks are identified and it is shown that the distribution of network type is related to community. Distribution of network type is further shown to be influenced by population stability and population density. It is argued that since network type is correlated with service use, identification of network type provides a useful tool for policy makers and practitioners in the context of care in the community.

Only a minority of adults of all age groups experience difficulty with their finances and affairs, due to the combined effect of their diminished competence and their social circumstances in placing them at risk, from themselves, or from family, friends or others (well-meaning or otherwise). If unable to manage independently or with informal assistance, formal intervention (guardianship) may be required. Neither the traditional formality of courts, nor the tests and clinical processes of medicine are well equipped to judge this in the abstract. Informal (family) models have their place but they (and other options) pose ethical difficulties. A more practical approach is that taken by Australia's multi-disciplinary panels.

Population ageing has led many countries to be concerned about the ‘economic burden’ of elders, and several have adopted the active ageing paradigm to reform policy. However, gender differences that moderate the effect of active ageing have been little considered. As in other nations in the European Union, Swiss federal authorities use the active ageing paradigm to reshape ageing policies, including the provision of incentives to seniors to remain in the labour market. At the same time, many recent and proposed changes draw on the assumption of gender equality, even though actual parity has not yet been demonstrated. We know little about how gender shapes retirement in Switzerland, other than in relation to financial inequality between women and men. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with Swiss retirees (N = 15) shows how men and women describe this time of life differently. All respondents characterised retirement as a time of freedom; but the meaning of such freedom diverged for men and women, reflecting the gender division of labour, which is further shaped by class. We discuss the implications of this difference for the gendered consequences of active ageing policies.

This paper draws on two data sources (Kelly's ethnographic study and a British Broadcasting Corporation television programme) to explore the practice of bodywork in the care of frail people with dementia in institutional settings. It explores the complexity of engaging in bodywork, particularly work that is distasteful to the care-worker, and shows how non-recognition of the selfhood of the person with dementia can result in practices that are demeaning and potentially abusive to those in receipt of such work. In contrast to a person-centred approach that urges practitioners to acknowledge people with dementia as unique individuals, with unique needs, wishes, abilities and desires, this paper argues for the use of Sabat's Selfs 1–3 construct to look for commonalities of selfhood, enabling care workers to recognise aspects of themselves in their patients as they carry out care, thereby facilitating care that empathically respects their patients' dignity and potential for vulnerability. Thus, it aims to advance theory and improve practice by arguing for the necessity of putting selfhood at the forefront of bodywork in order to facilitate respectful care that dignifies rather than objectifies the person.

This study focuses on the role of organisational setting and age in shaping individuals' narratives of embodied selfhood. It compares older and younger women's use of ‘narrative resistance’ to negotiate identity in light of their ageing and the negative social and personal meanings of being fat. Cordell and Ronai (1999) observed three types of narrative resistance among overweight people: loopholes, exemplars and continuums. This paper identifies two others: ‘justifications’, for behaviour that associated with weight gain, and ‘repentance’, for behaviour that reaffirmed a commitment to losing weight. Drawing from six months of participant-observation and in-depth interviews with 20 older and younger female clients of a commercial weight-loss organisation, this article shows that both the meanings women attributed to their experiences of slimming, and their opportunities for benefiting from organisational resources, varied by their stage in the lifecourse. The weight-loss group generated narrative strategies and opportunities for its members that were informed by both cultural constructions of ageing and the organisation's interests. While these strategies stopped short of empowering the clients to abandon restrictive dieting altogether, they did enable the older respondents to excuse temporary setbacks in weight loss and their deviation from (what they described as) the more exacting appearance standards of youth. At the same time, the strategic narratives reaffirmed constructions of ageing that present the older female body as uncontrollable and older women as unconcerned with physical attractiveness.