Spirituality is positively linked to health and well-being in later life, particularly among older adults of black ethnic groups. However, definitions of spirituality in the literature have largely been theoretically informed, rather than based on the views of older people themselves. We examined the spiritual perspectives of Black Caribbean and White British older adults based on in-depth interviews with 34 individuals aged between 60 and 95 years. Our aim was to develop a spiritual typology to add to an understanding of the process of spirituality in later life. Findings showed that Black Caribbean older individuals mostly defined spirituality in relation to their belief in a transcendent God, whereas White British older individuals tended to draw upon a wider range of spiritual, religious or secular notions. A spirituality typology in later life captured four categories of relationship, between ‘God to self’, ‘self to God’, ‘self to universe’ and ‘self to life’. The typology highlights the central role of ethnicity in shaping spiritual perspectives in later life, and identifies the multidimensional nature of spirituality among older adults, reflecting in part a developmental process, although a process which is socially and culturally constructed.

Home care for older people in England is commissioned through local authorities working predominantly with independent providers of care. Commissioners operate in a market model, planning and procuring home care services for local populations. Their role involves ‘managing’ and ‘shaping’ the market to ensure an adequate supply of care providers. Another imperative, emerging from the principles of personalisation, is the drive to achieve user outcomes rather than ‘time and task’ objectives. Little formal research has investigated the way commissioners reconcile these different requirements and organise commissioning. This study investigated commissioning approaches using qualitative telephone interviews with ten commissioners from different local authorities in England. The characteristics of commissioning were analysed thematically. Findings indicated (a) commissioning involved complex systems and processes, uniquely shaped for the local context, but frequently changed, suggesting a constant need for reframing commissioning arrangements; (b) partnerships with providers were mainly transactional, with occasional examples of collaborative models, that were considered to facilitate flexible services more appropriate for commissioning for personalised outcomes; and (c) only a small number of commissioners had attempted to reconcile the competing and incompatible goals of tightly prescribed contracting and working collaboratively with providers. A better understanding of flexible contracting arrangements and the hallmarks of a trusting collaboration is required to move beyond the procedural elements of contracting and commissioning.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of why people are still retiring earlier than would have been expected, despite policies that increase the retirement age. This is a qualitative study in a large public-service organisation in Sweden focusing particularly on how human resource routines aimed at middle management tend to inhibit the promotion of a prolonged working life, despite government efforts aimed at changing these actions. The results highlight three key routines (development talks, salary talks and internal recruitment) that inhibit prolonged working life. These routines seem rational and appropriate to the organisation's managers, because the demands of the job must have priority over employees’ capabilities in recruitment routines. Furthermore, it could be considered economically rational to prioritise salary demands of younger employees over those of older employees, and it may appear economically rational to stop further training efforts for older employees. In general, then, it seems reasonable to managers to make decisions based on objective criteria like age. Nevertheless, our results suggest that these routines may need to be redesigned in order to support a prolonged working life and to avoid a discrepancy between accepted prolonged working-life policies and the actions of organisational actors. The study further reveals how intra-organisational institutions (e.g. taken-for-granted mind-sets and norms) embedded in human resource routines may promote or inhibit prolonged working life, suggesting a need for change in those institutions.

This paper contributes to understanding housing adjustments in later life by investigating the role of four key lifecourse transitions experienced by older individuals and their households, namely changes in health, retirement, union transitions and adult children leaving the household. Using data from a representative sample of the Scottish population for the decade 2001–2011, the study examines who moves and, for movers, whether they adjust their housing size in response to changes in their personal and household circumstances. In particular, the study explores diversity in housing consumption at older ages by investigating whether the triggers of upsizing or downsizing differ across tenure groups. The majority of older adults in Scotland do not change their place of residence during the study decade. For the minority who do move, all four lifecourse transitions are significant triggers for residential relocation but there is considerable diversity across the two major tenure groups in the influence of household changes on their housing consumption adjustments. In both tenure groups, however, the presence of children in the household is associated with upsizing and is a significant impediment to downsizing. Given the relative rootedness of older parents with co-resident adult children and their propensity to upsize rather than downsize if they move, our findings raise concerns over the interdependencies between younger and older generations in the housing market.

Many countries are reforming their pension systems so people stay in work for longer to improve the long-term sustainability of public finances to support an increasing older population. This research aimed to explore the factors that enable or inhibit people to extend working life (EWL) in a large United Kingdom-based retail organisation. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with a purposive sample (N = 30): 15 employees aged ⩾60 and 15 supervisors supporting these employees. Older workers were predominately female, reflecting the gender profile of the older workers in the organisation. Older workers and supervisors reported that key facilitators to EWL were good health, the perception that older workers are of value, flexibility and choice, the need for an ongoing conversation across the lifecourse, the social and community aspect of work as a facilitator to EWL and the financial necessity to EWL. Perceived barriers to EWL included poor health, negative impacts of work on health, and a lack of respect and support.

This study explores the social construction of agency and wellbeing among 20 Chinese urban retirees aged between 50 and 82 years old (averaging 67), with a special focus on the impact of earlier life experiences in shaping later-life pathways. Today's retirees in urban China have experienced the communist collectivist ideology during the Mao era as well as the changes to everyday life brought about by the economic transformation from centrally planned socialism to a market-orientated economy. Thereby, life in retirement for Chinese elders becomes more than just an issue of dealing with increases in discretionary time after exit from full-time work, but also one of making sense of their earlier life experiences in the midst of dramatic social changes. A grounded theory approach with semi-structured, in-depth, face-to-face interviews was used for data collection and analysis. Three interrelated themes emerged: (a) reminiscence as a mechanism of meaning-making, (b) discovery and exercise of agency in later life in contrast to a rigidly structured earlier life, and (c) varying pathways to constructing the life-stage of retirement. The findings have refuted gerontological literature and public discourse that often portray Chinese elders as passive care recipients or helpless dependants. Further, the present study has practical implications for developing policies, designing programmes and providing services to improve the quality of life for today's older Chinese people.

Critical concern with infantilisation practices—i.e. the tendency to treat older people as if they are dependent children—has for the most part concentrated on the negative associations between infantilisation and dependency in later life. Infantilisation is usually defined as an unwelcome imposition on older men and women who are often portrayed as relatively powerless to resist. Whilst the negative consequences of enforced infantilisation must not be ignored there are also occasions when infantilisation may be regarded as a voluntary or chosen mode of resistance on the part of older people to the decrements and external impositions of later life. The concept of infantilisation may therefore be enlarged to include modes of resistance involving processes of mutual identification of the old with the young; in certain instances even as a form of conspiracy between these two age groups against the wider society. This paper therefore pursues fictional images of such rapport as they occur in a selection of the ‘William’ stories written by Richmal Crompton during the period from 1919 up to her death in 1969, and with an appeal which continues up to the present day. The argument is that these stories of alliances between boyhood and ‘elders’ may be regarded as vivid examples (a repository of positive images) of what may be described as ‘positive infantilisation’: that is to say, of consciousness of the independence of subjective selfhood from the ageing body in the face of the misperceptions and misleading stereotypes of the ‘mature’ adult world.

To the existing ways of categorizing elderly individuals we here add a reasonably objective approach using recent survey data and statistical methods of multivariate analysis. The groupings obtained have been surprisingly clear-cut, so that simple rules can be devised for discriminating between clusters. We suggest this analysis as a useful way of gleaning information about elderly people, information which may help in the efficient allocation of services.

Depression in later life is one of the most common mental disorders. Several instruments have been developed to detect the presence or the absence of certain symptoms or emotional disorders, based on cut-off points. However, the use of a cut-off does not allow identification of depression sub-types or distinguish between mild and severe depression. As a result, depression may be under- or over-diagnosed in older people. This paper aims to apply a model-driven approach to classify individuals into distinct sub-groups, based on different combinations of depressive and emotional conditions. This approach is based on two distinct statistical solutions: first, a latent class analysis is applied to the items collected by the depression scale and, according to the final model, the probability of belonging to each class is calculated for every individual. Second, a factor analysis of these classes is performed to obtain a reduced number of clusters for easy interpretation. We use data collected through the EURO-D scale in a large sample of older individuals, participants of the sixth wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. We show that by using such a model-based approach it is possible to classify individuals in a more accurate way than the simple dichotomisation ‘depressed’ versus ‘non-depressed’.

Older adults benefit greatly from being physically active yet they are the least active generation. To appeal to older consumers, to reduce barriers older adults experience to becoming physically active and to increase the number of physically active older adults, the exercise market has been divided into mainstream fitness and age-segregated programming that specifically targets older adults. This research employed an institutional ethnography approach to understand better the social discourses and material practices that shape socially (in/ex)clusive physical cultures for older exercisers in both mainstream and older-adult group exercise classes. Textual analyses, interviews and field observations revealed that the material and discursive work practices intended to promote inclusivity in group exercise physical cultures actually engendered age-exclusive markets. Herein, we discuss how the guidelines and policies put forth by these certifying bodies, and the training curricula they publish, govern group exercise practices in a manner that tends to align with dominant ideological discourses conflating age and ability. We conclude by arguing that in order to create more inclusive physical cultures, mainstream fitness providers need to embrace options that appeal to potential group exercise consumers of all abilities, regardless of age.

Policies to extend working life (EWL) assume homogeneous workers face similar choices about working longer: this may be difficult for women, workers in physically onerous jobs or in low-paid precarious employment. Work-life trajectories are gendered; women interrupt employment and pension-building to provide care. There is occupational variation in capacities to prolong working lives: physically demanding jobs cause work-related health deficits. The precariously employed cannot contribute regularly to pensions and may face age discrimination. This research provides an inter-occupational and cross-national dimension to EWL research, comparing women teachers and health-care workers in the United States of America (USA) and Republic of Ireland. It documents intra-cohort distinctions that emerge among women when considering educational opportunities and occupational tracks expressed in lifecourse trajectories and accumulated capacities for extended work. Analysis draws on interview data from ten teachers and ten health-care workers in each country, comparing the implications of EWL policies for women workers: in precarious versus secure occupations and occupations with different physical demands. It reveals work-life trajectories leading to poorer financial and health outcomes for older health-care workers, especially in the USA. Most women (regardless of occupation or country) opposed extending working life, with concerns ranging from health status and ability to work to the desire to have healthy years in retirement. The most important distinctions are between the occupational categories considered, rather than cross-national differences. Implications for national and work-place policy and research are considered.

In a southwest coast Newfoundland fishing village elderly outporters are accorded special licence to behave in ways considered inappropriate for younger generations. Capitalising on their status as folk heroes and heroines of traditional outport culture, older people challenge each other to redress old wrongs or actively create new issues for dispute. The entire family may reluctantly become involved in these imbroglios. This case study of a land feud between an elderly woman and man demonstrates how aggression is mediated by the structural confines of local sex roles and outport egalitarianism, which severely limit the potential of octogenarians' altercations to disrupt village life.

Violence to elderly people in residetial institutions is well documented. In this paper both violence and resulting death are examined in the German context. A thesis is put forward that is not lack of humanity but lack of professional routine which is the main cause.

In this paper, we present findings from a recent national study of elderly persons in Israel which cover two related questions: I. How do spouses' characteristics and activities affect the social participation of married older men and women? 2. Is the effect of husbands' characteristics and activities on wives equivalent or symmetrical to that of wives' characteristics and activities on husbands? The study is based on analyses of data collected in the Israel Survey of Persons Aged 60 and Over in Households, 1985, a national sample survey of households conducted by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics which included approximately 4,500 persons age 60 and over. An innovation of our study has been the design of a data file which enables us to study the activities, role incumbency, and participation of the respondents in relation to the characteristics and activities of their spouses.

We study the performance by husbands and wives of social roles designated as ‘major commitment’ roles (MCRs), in that they are roles performed in social contexts invoving commitments over time to the activity and to the social units in which they are carried out: (a) employment, (b) continued parenting involving assistance to adult children, (c) full housekeeping, and (d) volunteer activity. Characteristics and roles of the wives of older married male respondents, and of the husbands of older married female respondents in Israel, are significantly associated with the respondents' performance of the MCRs which we have identified. However, the ‘marginal effects coefficients’ based on logistic regression equations show that the relative weight of spouses' characteristics and roles is small compared with that of the respondents' own characteristics and other competing or mutually supportive roles. There are both symmetries and assymmetries in the patterns of effects of husbands' and wives' characteristics and roles on prevalences of MCRs among the older married respondents.

The problems of introducing change in long-term care settings for elderly people are discussed in relation to social, psychological and organisational factors operating within the institution. It is argued that the poor maintenance and generalisation of many behavioural interventions is in part due to researchers adopting too narrow a framework. Four issues are discussed and illustrated: 1. The role of the researcher in relation to care staff. 2. Relationships with elderly patients. 3. Change as criticism. 4. Conflicting policies within the institution.

This paper examines the provider side of the care-home sector and focuses on managers' and owners' motivations for providing care-home services for older people, and whether those motivations changed between 1994 and 2003. There were a number of significant policy changes over that time, including an increased ‘marketisation’ of the sector, coupled with an increase in regulation. Critics of these changes argued that they could adversely affect the motivational structure of the principal provider agents. Previously altruistic or public-service motivations might turn into more self-interested concerns: ‘knights’ might become ‘knaves’. To test this proposition, data were collected across eight English local authorities using face-to-face interviews and postal questionnaires. The results indicate that, although local care-home markets underwent some major changes, individuals' motivational profiles remained relatively stable. Further analysis of the relationship between motivations and the social-care market environment suggests that, while voluntary-sector providers are primarily driven by caring motivations and less concerned with income maximising and professional development, private-sector home manager and owners seemed to be more focused on the financial aspects of providing care services, professional motivations, and on their independence in running a care home. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Nursing homes in the United States have for over 40-years been riddled with evidence of poor performance. To combat problems in this industry, state and federal governments developed an elaborate monitoring and regulatory structure. At the same time, an important citizens' movement involving nursing-home consumer advocacy groups (CAGs) came to life. This paper presents the results of a postal survey of 47 active nursing-home consumer advocacy groups. They indicate that the majority of these organisations were started by an individual dissatisfied with the care provided to a family member. The political arena in which these organisations were most active was State legislatures. Though they varied considerably, the average CAG operated on a thin financial margin, largely supported by member contributions and donations. These organisations defined their success in terms of their ability to generate policy changes at the State level. Unfortunately, as they pursued these changes, they often failed to develop the organisational infrastructure necessary to assure the CAGs' continued operation. When CAGs ceased operations, it was in most cases the loss of the organisation's original leader or the cumulative effects of the constant struggle to maintain adequate financial resources.

This article examines how older adults make decisions about their medications through interconnected axes of trust that operate across social networks. Trust is negotiated by older adults enrolled in a deprescribing programme which guides them through the process of reducing medications to mitigate risks associated with polypharmacy. Habermas’ work on the significance of communicative action in negotiating trust within social relationships informs our analysis, specifically in-depth semi-structured interviews with older adults about their medication use and the role of social networks in managing their health. Participants were age 70+ and experiencing polypharmacy. Our analysis discusses the social nature of medication practices and the importance of social networks for older adults’ decision-making. Their perspective reflects the critique of late-modern society put forward by Habermas. Negotiating trust in pharmaceutical decision-making requires navigating tensions across and between system networks (health-care professionals) and life-world networks (family and friends). This study contributes to our knowledge of how distinct forms of trust operate in different social spheres, setting the context for the way health-care decisions are made across social networks. Our analysis reinforces the need for older adults to engage meaningfully in health-care decision-making such that a convergence between system-world and life-world structures is encouraged. This would improve deprescribing programmes’ efficacy as older adults optimise their medication use and improve overall quality of life.

Although the literature on social capital, social support and social networks uses the concept of emotional support, studies rarely recognise nuances of the emotional relationships in late life. Using a personal communities framework, we examine the subjective meaning of family and friendship ties that form the network of emotionally close relationships of a cohort of Chilean people between 60 and 74 years of age. Chile is an interesting case to investigate personal communities, as the country is facing both a rapid process of population ageing and the consequences of abrupt socio-cultural changes triggered by a military government. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews using personal communities diagrams that enabled study participants to reflect on what and how different types of personal ties were important to them. Data analysis included thematic analysis of interview transcripts and classification of identified personal communities using Pahl and Spencer's typology. The personal communities framework proved useful in capturing the composition of older people's networks of close relationships and in reflecting the diverse ways different ties are relevant in late life. We further developed a complementary typology based on the distinction between ‘clustered’ and ‘hierarchical’ personal communities. This complementary typology adds a cultural dimension to understand better emotional closeness in late life in a context of rapid socio-cultural changes affecting levels of social trust.

A key issue in understanding the social lives of older people is how active they are in coping with the demands of ageing. Often the ‘successfulness’ of ageing is measured with medical and biological criteria. While the notion of ‘active ageing’ is more appealing and neutral, its meaning is often obscured, fragmented or inconsistent. Our aims in this study were to establish ‘active ageing’ as a process in which older people try to take control of their lives by conforming to or resisting different social imaginaries of later life, and to explore individuals’ strategies for making the best use of available resources and fending off potential risks of social exclusion. We adopted a two-stage research design. First, we produced artistic images that corresponded to social imaginaries of tensions in ageing in three social domains (politics, mass media and older people). Then, we used these images as stimuli in interviews with a balanced sample of 32 middle-aged and older residents of Santiago, Chile, to discover their strategies for coping with these tensions. Although imaginaries of ageing tended to describe ageing in terms of restrictions and stereotypes, we found diverse and increasingly flexible life projects and expectations of activity in later life.