The active management of the experience of living with dementia appears to improve quality of life despite the lack of disease modification. However, research to date has been largely of modest scale and explanatory factors for improvements have been under-conceptualised. Thus, although promulgated through national strategies, the evidence base is relatively weak. This paper reports on a nation-wide study of the influence of the National Dementia Strategy for England in relation to Dementia Adviser and Peer Support Network services in 40 demonstration sites. The research aimed to identify ways in which the services contribute to the wellbeing and resilience of people with dementia and care partners. A mixed-methods research design collected data through: activity and outcome monitoring; organisational surveys; in-depth case studies, including qualitative interviews with people with dementia (N = 47) and care partners (N = 54), wellbeing and quality of life measures, and interviews with staff and other stakeholders (N = 82). Three themes are explored: addressing individual and community needs; promoting independence, control and choice; and getting a life back. Services promoted independence, control and choice, and consequently enabled people to re-narrate their lives as purposeful within their communities. Ways in which these are achieved resemble the public health model of lay health advisor and this research adds to the imperative to approach dementia as a key public health concern.

In order to capture the rapidly changing reality of older workers, it is important to study retirement not as a one-off transition, but rather as a series of diverse pathways that unfold during the period before and after reaching the full retirement age. The retirement transitions of men and women have been shown to vary widely according to individual characteristics such as health, education and marital status, but also according to macro-institutional factors, such as welfare regimes and gender norms. While there is a consensus about the combined influence of institutional and individual factors in shaping retirement transitions, previous research has rarely included both levels of analysis. This study aims to close this research gap. Using a pooled-country dataset from three panel surveys, covering 11 nations, we examine the retirement pathways of 1,594 women and 1,105 men during a 12-year period (2004–2016) around the country- and gender-specific full pension age. Results show that retirement pathways diverge considerably across countries and lifecourse regimes. The distribution of men and women between the different pathways is also variable, both within and across societal contexts. More importantly, the influence of individual-level characteristics, such as education, on the gendering of retirement pathways is not identical across societal contexts. These findings provide useful insights into the gender-differentiated implications of policies aimed at extending working lives.

This paper examines how some elderly Chinese tenants in a cluster of housing schemes in the north of England differed in their perception, consciousness and management of time. It examines how there was too much or too little time for some of these tenants and how time played a part in their personal and social identification arising from their experiences of migration. Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis is intended to be a transdisciplinary theory that could be used to theorise ‘everyday life’. The writer superimposes this concept on the activity and disengagement theories of ageing to add meaning to the ethnographic data gathered and argues that ageing is not a simple matter of activity or disengagement. These Chinese elders coped with change through a flexible and ongoing process of adapting to different rhythms of life. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical understanding of ageing for a minority in Britain and to present a novel theoretical perspective on research approaches to ageing.

This longitudinal study evaluated the direct effects of providing/receiving family support on mortality in older adults with different living arrangements in Taiwan. All data analysed were obtained from the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging, 1996–2007, of residents aged ⩾67 years (1,492 men and 1,177 women) and Taiwan's National Death Register. Living arrangements were divided into living alone, living only with spouse, living with family and living with others. Support was mainly defined as family support divided into two categories: providing and receiving. The effect of providing/receiving family support on the mortality of older adults was evaluated using Cox regression analysed by living arrangement. Participants living with their families had lower educational levels (illiterate or elementary school) and more disability in both activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living. However, they provided more family support than those in other living arrangements. After adjusting for several potentially confounding variables, including background characteristics, economic status and various health status measures, results showed that older adults living with their families and providing support had an 11 per cent lower mortality rate (Hazard ratio = 0.89; 95 per cent confidence interval = 0.83–0.96; p = 0.0018). In conclusion, we found that, when living with family, the lives of older adults can be extended by providing support, clearly supporting the old adage ‘it is more blessing to give than to receive’. Older adults wanting to extend their lives can be encouraged to provide more help to their families.

The present study was focused on the relationship between the subjective assessment of physical health and satisfaction with life (SWL) in older adults. The relationship itself was found in previous studies, but we postulated that it is moderated by ego-resiliency (ER). To verify this hypothesis, 124 Polish participants aged between 60 and 89 (mean = 71.72, standard deviation = 7.08) were asked to complete questionnaire measures of: self-assessed health (SAH; measured with seven items from the World Health Organization Quality of Life WHOQOL-BREF assessment), SWL (measured with the Satisfaction with Life Scale) and ER (measured with the Ego-Resiliency Scale ER89). The results confirmed the moderating role of ER by showing that the relationship between SAH and SWL was statistically significant only when ER was high or moderate, while there was no relationship for participants with low ER. To interpret these results, we postulate that ego-resilient older adults are more accurate in the assessment of health, i.e. their SAH reflects the objective condition more closely, which strengthens the relationship between SAH and wellbeing. ER is thus conceived as an important psychological resource that promotes the accuracy of SAH and, consequently, makes it a more robust predictor of SWL. We hypothesise that this is based on the positive relationship between ER and wisdom in older adults.

The economic participation rates of older men have fallen dramatically over the last decade. Early retirements have accounted for much although not all of this reduction and yet early retirement has been a somewhat neglected aspect of the social scientific literature. Initially the prerogative of managers and white-collar workers, early retirement has spread to wider sections of the work force and has generally been seen by managers and trade unions as an uncontentious way of achieving ‘headcount reduction'. Research into the experiences of early retirees is sparse but such survey data as does exist suggests relatively high levels of satisfaction. This paper presents some of the findings of a small, qualitative study of the experience of early retirement from the chemical industry of a sample of 40 men from the West Riding of Yorkshire. An attempt was made to construct a quality-of-life index with which to compare and contrast their experiences and investigate some of the major factors in determining the outcome of early retirement. The paper highlights the role of further paid work in enabling healthy men with marketable skills to effectively negotiate their own ‘flexible retirements’. Those with ill health and a lack of skills were unable to do this and these factors were associated with a relatively low quality of life.

Provision for old people who are in need of continuing care requires close co-operation between informal carers and different agencies and disciplines providing health and social care. In the United Kingdom, the present system of care has evolved from earlier patterns of care centred on the asylums and the poor law with its workhouse institutions. It lacks cohesion. Despite the designation of old people as a priority group, resources are still inadequate to provide a good quality of care. Organisational differences between health and social services can lead to inefficient use of existing resources. More specialised medical, psychiatric and social services for old people enhance the possibilities for co-operation even though they may appear to lead to greater fragmentation. The history of the development of these services in the UK, including the recent expansion of private sector care, is reviewed, with special attention from the medical perspective to the phenomenon of ‘bed blocking’. The recently published Griffiths Report on community care is briefly considered, and some principles for future developments are laid down.

The aims of this exploratory study were: to investigate the process of visual art appreciation in a person with dementia, in real time; and to test the feasibility of using video-analysis as a method to explore this process by and with a person who has minimal verbal expression. Gallery personnel guided a woman with severe dementia around an exhibition. Audio-visual recordings of the interactions were analysed. Patterns were identified, and interpreted in the light of conversation analysis theory and research. Evidence was found of turn-taking vocalisations on the part of the research participant. Her participation in a dialogical process was facilitated by the skilled and empathic gallery personnel in ways that the analysis makes clear. We argue that this supports the inference that successful communicative acts took place, contrary to expectations in the light of the participant's level of disability. We demonstrate in this paper how a woman with minimal speech due to dementia was enabled to engage with visual art through the facilitation of an expert guide, attuned to her needs. This is a novel example of a person-centred approach, because it takes place outside the context of caring, which is the typical setting for examining person-centred ways of relating to individuals with dementia.

In order to analyse the allocation of public care services in the city of Solna, Sweden, and how they changed in response to a rapid growth of the number of elderly people, a comparison was made between two surveys, 1985 and 1991.

The surveys comprised all citizens of Solna who, on the day of the survey, were receiving long-term public medical and/or social care services. Living arrangements and services received were registered together with assessments of social support and disability/dependency. The latter was measured according to a special scale (the ASIM index) and – for 1991 – the Katz index of ADL. The assessments were made by the ordinary staff. The analysis showed that older and non-married persons were more likely to become clients of the public care system. Institutionalisation was also more common among the non-married – especially for men.

Connected to the rapid increase in the number of the very old in the context of limited resources was a sharp decline during the period 1985–1991 in the proportion of the Solna population that received public care services in some form. This decline concerned all age-groups of both sexes, married as well as non-married, but the married were more affected than the non-married – especially among the women. The reductions in the proportion of the population that received care in the home affected mostly married persons in the oldest age group. Reductions in institutionalisation had most impact on very old, non-married men – partly counteracted by increases in the provision of home help. Multivariate analysis showed functional disability – in 1991 dependency in ADL according to Katz - and living arrangements to be the most important variables in explaining the allocation of home help in domiciliary care and sheltered housing.

Many current discussions of welfare state reforms focus on the ‘young old’, a group now generally perceived as healthy people past retirement age without a legal responsibility for dependent persons in need of care. For the welfare state, they constitute a resource whose activities are hard to steer. This article focuses on the influence of the welfare state on the number of ‘young old’ people. It describes different ways in which the welfare state influences the number of young old persons, and investigates whether variations in the regulations for the ages of normal, early and late retirement are the prime cause. The paper also estimates the share of the young old among those aged 50–90 years in 10 European countries in 2004 using comparable survey data. These shares ranged between 36 and 49 per cent for men and between 35 and 52 per cent for women. High shares were found in continental European countries, and low shares in Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. The shares in southern European countries varied among the countries and by gender. To explain the variations in the share, country differences in retirement regulations proved helpful but insufficient. When the overall influence of the welfare state on the share of young old persons in the population was analysed, a country-characteristic pattern emerged.

Staying Put projects provide practical help to older home owners with the repair and improvement of their homes. A number of studies have examined the immediate impact of this help on the housing conditions experienced by older people and on their ability to remain living independently in the community, but the extent to which these benefits could last for a long period of time was not known. This paper describes the findings of a study which attempted to examine the longer-term impact of the Staying Put service. A sample of clients helped by Staying Put in the early 1980s were traced and interviewed in order to assess the impact of the assistance received and to examine their current and future housing and care needs. Although the study could not conclusively disentangle the impact of the Staying Put service from other factors influencing the ability of clients to live independently, it concluded that the help received was significant in improving housing conditions over a long period. The study made recommendations which aim to increase the effectiveness of Staying Put projects in the future, including the establishment of a target standard for the housing conditions of clients, the development of mechanisms for continuing contact with clients, and the provision of advice on moving on options where appropriate. More generally, however, the study concluded that more resources to fund services like Staying Put were required from government and from local and health authorities if they were to be more effective in helping clients to live independently.

Although much has been written about the problems and suffering of aged persons in contemporary societies, other conditions exist in which third-age persons flourish. This study focuses on the unique qualities of members of professions who not only remain active, but are also engaged in leadership roles (the outcome variable). The study distinguished between leaders and non-leaders, and explored individual as well as groupings of independent variables which may account for these differences. Data were gathered, by means of mailed questionnaires, from persons of retirement age in seven professions in Israel. Data-analysis, besides testing the hypotheses, included devoting attention to interrelationships among independent variables and leadership behaviours of different types of leaders, as well as to leadership patterns within different professions.

Leadership is seen as adding significantly to the richness of the retirement years, and to an ageing person's ability to contribute to improving organisational, neighbourhood, and community life. Implications are suggested for planners of pre-retirement programmes, leisure-time services, and voluntarism opportunities for today's aged.

In a youth-centred culture, where ageing is associated with physical and mental decline, investment in a youthful appearance promises access to socially valuable resources. The need for regular care for the self, primarily through consumption, constitutes part of the narrative of successful or positive ageing. Due to its emphasis on self-reliance and efforts to remain healthy, productive and youthful, the discourse of successful ageing has been seen as intersecting with a neoliberal rationality, or a shift of responsibility for risks associated with ageing from the state to the individual. While some authors criticise an emphasis on individual effort to maintain personal wellbeing for a lack of attention to structural factors, others view such an approach favourably as a way of transcending state paternalism. In this paper, I engage with the discourse of ‘responsibilisation’ drawing on the interviews with middle-aged, middle-class women from Moscow about their experiences of ageing. I employ the theoretical framework of ‘governmentality’ to demonstrate how the interviewed women's attempts to make sense of what it meant to age ‘appropriately’ within their milieus informed both their awareness of a need to improve and reinvent the self constantly through consumption in the context of post-Soviet Russian society, and their questioning of and resistance to this pressure.

This study investigated if people are acquainted with the term ‘ageism’, and to what extent acquaintance with this term corresponds with reports of discrimination, due to age. The study included an online survey, answered by 1,025 Israeli respondents. The questionnaire began by asking the respondents to define ‘What is ageism?’ (gilanut in Hebrew) and then to mark ‘If and what types of discrimination they experienced in the last year’. Subsequently, we defined and demonstrated the term ageism and asked participants to share experiences of this phenomenon; 457 (45%) participants were not familiar with the term. In the group that was unfamiliar with the term, only 46 (10%) reported that they had such experiences. In the group that was acquainted with the term, 208 (30%) reported that they had experienced ageism. In contrast, once the term, ageism, was defined and demonstrated in the survey, 638 (62%) respondents shared experiences of ageism in their lives. Of those who shared their experiences of ageism, 202 (31%) were initially unfamiliar with the term. The study's results show that there is an association between the linguistic representation of the phenomenon of ageism and reports of ageism. In the wider sense, the study shows that language and words have the power to help people understand and interpret social and human experiences.

There is evidence that older widowed women provide narrative accounts of the events that led up to the deaths of their husbands. These accounts are qualitatively different from other parts of their interviews. This study examines interviews from older widowers and asks what features characterise their narrative accounts of their wife's death. The data show that men do speak of the death of their wife in a qualitatively different way than they do of other matters: women speak emotionally whilst men speak of their behaviour. Using Kirsi, Hervonen and Jylhä's typology of male care-givers, we find that their interviews are characterised by four types of speech: factual, agentic, familistic and destiny speech. In addition, we find two additional speech types related to blame – one related to medical negligence (a subset of destiny speech) and one to self-blame (a subset of familistic speech). We argue that the use of these patterns of speech allow men to preserve their masculine identities at a time when bereavement puts them under intense strain.

Horse–human relationships expressed as a kind of co-embodied engagement or mutual physicality between horse and rider receive note in emerging literatures on equine sports and multi-species ethnography. Less attention focuses on the impacts of equestrienne activities on ageing female bodies. This study is based on analysis of narrative data collected from open-ended qualitative interviews with 36 women, aged 40–70, who participate in a variety of equestrian activities and sports in the North American Midwest and Arctic Norway. Although ageing informants associate animal partnerships with the maintenance of health, and although informants' narratives show some accord with master narratives of ageing athletes identified by sports sociologists, the natures of horse–human relationships invite more explicit, horse- specific contexts of analysis. The phrase ‘autobiologies of ageing’ denotes how women's narratives of equestrienne ageing privilege and centre a subjective sense of physical identity or embodied self where the rider's experience of her body becomes entangled with and impartible from that of the horse or horses she rides.

Rapid economic growth in post-war Japan, has been accompanied by unprecedented population ageing. In this paper the impact of Japan's ageing population is analysed in respect of (i) health-care services (ii) allocation of resources to health care and (iii) the manpower requirements to support health in old age. These projections are based upon macroeconomic modelling techniques.

It has been widely corroborated that recent stressful life events could impact wellbeing; nevertheless, it is not clear whether stressful situations experienced in the past and the individual resources used to deal with them influence older adults’ wellbeing. This study aims to analyse the influence of stressful past events and personal control beliefs, or the extent to which people believe they can control or influence their environment in order to achieve desired outcomes, on negative affect and domain-specific life satisfaction in a cross-sectional sample of 1,177 Spanish people age 50 years and older. For this purpose, the measurement of ten stressful past events, perceived control beliefs, negative affect and life satisfaction were obtained. Preliminary analyses showed that domain-specific life satisfaction grouped into two factors: internal and external life satisfaction. The results of the partial least squares structural equation model indicated that stressful events and control beliefs have an impact on both negative affect and life satisfaction in old age. Stressful past events had a negative effect on life satisfaction, while control beliefs were positively associated with negative affect. The model was able to predict the variance of internal life satisfaction at 37.5 per cent.