The experience of retirement and old age of two cohorts of the residents of Paris, born successively around 1907 and 1921, have been studied through prospective longitudinal studies, each of which comprised several waves of interviews. The two cohorts were first interviewed as they approached retirement and old age, in respectively 1972 and 1984. Moulded by the strong contemporaneous social change, the principal life experiences of the two cohorts have been quite different – from the social and geographic settings of their birth, their childhood and education, through their occupations and career advancement, parenting and family lives, housing conditions and residential mobility, earned incomes and pensions, longevity, and utilisation of medical care. Above all, their long lives have been strongly conditioned by rapid and radical socio-economic changes, particularly in the occupational structure, the rising standard of living, and improvements in urban housing standards, social protection, personal services and average life span. In contrast to their rising material standards, the cohorts have faced the gradual spread of less sympathetic attitudes towards older people, particularly those who lose their autonomy. As the number of people in advanced old age has relentlessly increased, they have in several respects become more distant from the rest of society. Maintaining the continued ‘inclusion’ and full citizenship of frail older people is not only a growing moral and practical problem, but also a major political problem in a democracy.

This issue achieves 25 years of publication of Ageing & Society and, you might wish to know, the 15,000th page. The silver anniversary will be celebrated in several modest ways. To begin with the beginning, Cambridge University Press has established an electronic version of the first issue on the journal's web pages, and made it accessible free-of-charge to all. Volume 1 included several notable and still-cited papers: those most often remembered are the foundation essays in ‘critical gerontology’ by Peter Townsend and Alan Walker, but there were many other strong and original contributions.

Painters' self-portraits offer the opportunity to study signs of ageing through the centuries. In this paper, we examine 687 self-portraits by 506 European painters from the 15th to the 20th century. To qualify for the analysis, painters had to be unquestionably identified, have known years of birth and death, and the self-portraits had to be dated unequivocally. ‘Age scores’ for the characteristics of the lower face were developed. Ptosis of the upper eyelid, bags under the eyes and the characteristics of beards were also recorded. Among the main findings, the painters of self-portraits that exhibited ptosis of the upper eyelid had a higher actual age than those of portraits which did not (55 versus 38 years). Similarly, those that represented bags under the eyes were older painters (47 versus 33 years). The percentages of portraits with eyelid ptosis and bags under the eyes were similar through the centuries and in three zones of Europe. The age scores of the lower half of the face were also consistent in all centuries, except at ages 40–49 years. The painters' average lifespan significantly increased during the 18th century; and within Europe a north–south lifespan gradient has been evident since the 17th century. We conclude that ageing has had similar facial manifestations over the last five centuries, except between 40 and 50 years of age.

The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between household structure and mortality at older ages in Parma, Italy. The household is an important setting for older people's social roles and social relations and its composition has a strong association with their health. The study examines 57,830 people aged 65 or more years drawn from the population registers of Parma (Italy). Record linkage from 1989 to 2000 was carried out using their unique identification numbers. Through the linked records, it was possible to follow changes in each person's and family's history provided they remained resident in Parma. The descriptive analyses show that elderly women were more likely than men to live alone, probably on account of their higher longevity. Only 10 per cent of elderly men lived alone, as compared with 32 per cent of older women. Nonetheless, the survival curves demonstrate that up to the age of 80 years, women living alone experienced lower mortality than those living with partners. A logistic regression model based on ‘event history analysis’ was performed using the longitudinal data. The results suggest that being married provides a protective role against mortality in later life only for men. It is possible that elderly women who take care of a husband or relatives do not care for themselves (or their health), as do older women who live alone.

In a paper in the January issue of this volume of Ageing & Society, Eric Midwinter argued that ‘much can be learned from re-drawing the demographic map with social rather than chronological contours’. This opinion reflects a widespread view among social gerontologists that chronological age is an ‘empty’ variable, even though it is central to the construction of social identities, both in bureaucratic contexts and in less formal social interaction. This paper draws on material stored in the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, England. A large panel of ‘ordinary people’ was asked to write about ‘growing older’ in 1992 and about ‘birthdays’ in 2002. An analysis of the ways in which they revealed their age demonstrates that the revelation of chronological age is unproblematic in certain contexts that are deemed appropriate. Difficulties arise as a result of the association of age with various more nebulous statuses such as ‘middle-aged’ and ‘old’. The implications for the concept of ‘the third age’ are discussed and it is concluded that social gerontology should pay more attention to the theoretical significance of chronological age and age-identity and less to age statuses.

The major purpose of this study was to examine the effects of socio-economic status (SES) on changes in functional abilities, as measured by Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scales, among older people in Taiwan. A prospective longitudinal study design was used. A panel of 874 community-dwelling older people were followed over four years (1994 to 1998). Three SES indicators, education, having ‘extra’ money (more than required for basic necessities), and principal lifetime occupation were included in separate multiple logistic regression models of functional change in physical ADL (PADL) and in instrumental ADL (IADL). Over the four years, the study cohort experienced greater decreases in IADL functioning than in PADL functioning. Having ‘extra’ money was significantly and negatively associated with PADL decline, while level of education had a strong positive relationship with IADL functioning. In addition to SES, age was significantly associated with PADL and IADL functioning change. The paper also reports a comparison of similar findings from several eastern and western countries. This has established that among the available SES indicators, the level of education has most consistently been shown in both eastern and western population studies to be related to health and health change, and that self-perceived economic resource is also related to older people's health in Asian populations.

With reference to the concept of ‘the stages of life’ rather than ‘ages’, this paper examines the possibilities of estimating population figures for the First, Second and Third Ages in the United Kingdom, both for the present and at points in the past. The approach utilises the economic status of the citizenry – in particular, before, during and after paid work – rather than their ages or birth dates. The quantitative approximations are accompanied by a social commentary about the leverage of economic pressures, especially the calls or otherwise of employment, in effect, the Second Age, on the relative size of the First and Third Ages. It is concluded that much may be gained from ‘redrawing the composition of the population with social rather than demographic contours’.

Arab immigrants are a significant cultural presence in the United States of America and in this study's locale, the Detroit Metropolitan Area, yet their situations and experiences have rarely been examined. Six focus group interviews were conducted with both English-speaking and Arabic-speaking immigrants aged 60 years and older, to explore their descriptions of their ageing experiences with particular reference to expected and received social support. Tensions between cultural ideals and pragmatic realities were found about three topics: nursing home placements, expectations of children for care-giving, and state-sponsored support. Nursing homes were both feared and, in a form that met their cultural needs, seen as places that should be built. On children's support, there was a clear preference for independence and a simultaneous appreciation of children's help while wishing not to burden them. The informants saw state-sponsored support as providing material resources that could support independence, and as a source of discrimination because of their national origins. The Arab-American elders' narratives revealed diverse attitudes and experiences. By documenting the ways in which they made sense of their situations, initial assertions of cultural ideals were seen to be modified by more realistic expressions of support expectations, and an understanding was reached of the support strategies that they utilised to alleviate the demands and stresses on both the older immigrants and their families.

This article reports the findings of research into the functioning of companies' and organisations' internal labour markets. Four case studies of Australian and United Kingdom public and private sector organisations have been undertaken with two principal aims: to elucidate the challenges and barriers to the employment of older workers, and to demonstrate the benefits to business and to older workers of age-aware human resource management policies. In each of the case-study organisations, age-related assumptions affected the management of knowledge and skills and the ways in which older and younger workers were employed. Managing age relations in organisations requires an understanding of the ways in which workers of different ages are perceived and how these associate with sub-optimal deployment. The article concludes by suggesting that policies directed at older workers alone will ignore the age and age-group dynamics that pervade workplaces. To promote the better deployment of younger and older individuals in rapidly transforming organisations, there is a need for policy makers, employers and employees to be attentive to the age-group relationships that currently inform workplace practices. Organisations cannot ignore these age dynamics, but should adopt ‘age aware’ rather than ‘age free’ practices. The recommended human-resources approach would attend to individuals' capabilities and not stereotype them by age.

In the United Kingdom, as in many other developed countries, there is an established market in the provision of long-term care-homes for older people. Implicit in the market mechanism is the assumption that homes will close, but it was not until 1999–2000 that closures of care-homes received widespread public attention. This paper draws on a multi-method study that investigated home closures in England from several perspectives. The rate of home closures rose substantially between 1998 and 2000 and, although sources give different estimates, it subsequently appears to have remained at about five per cent each year. The net result has been a reduction in capacity, particularly in smaller homes. While their emphases differed, both regulators and providers broadly pointed to the same factors behind the closures: the local authorities, the majority purchasers of care-home places, were under pressure to keep fees down, and national policies that raised costs were coming into force or were anticipated, notably the National Minimum Wage and the National Care Standards. Other factors, such as problems in recruiting suitable staff, particularly those with nursing qualifications, also played a role. The government's response, driven primarily by concerns about the effect on delayed discharges from acute hospital beds, was to retreat on the Standards and to increase funding to local authorities. While this has been a helpful step, more needs to be done to prevent good homes closing and to provide incentives that will retain and promote diverse provision.

Chronological age can be an unsatisfactory method of discriminating between older people. The lay concept of how old people actually feel may be more useful. The aim of the analyses reported in this paper was to investigate indicators of age-identity (or subjective age) among a national random sample of people aged 65 or more years living at home in Britain. Information was initially collected by home interview and a follow-up postal questionnaire 12–18 months later. The age that respondents felt was a more sensitive indicator than chronological age of many indicators of the respondents’ health, psychological and social characteristics. Multiple regression analysis showed that baseline health and functional status, and reported changes in these at follow-up, explained 20.4 per cent of the variance in self-perceived age. Adding baseline mental health (anxiety/depression), feelings and fears about ageing at follow-up explained a further 0.8 per cent of the variance, making the total variance explained 21.2 per cent. It is concluded that measures of physical health and functional status and their interactions influenced age-identity. Mental health status and psychological perceptions made a small but significant additional contribution.

The pursuit of independence and avoidance of unnecessary care-home admissions are key elements of British government policy for the care of older people. The present government's objective to maintain independence has been compromised by the ‘Residential Allowance’ which, as a component of social security payable to residents in independent-sector homes, could be seen as an incentive to place people in care-homes rather than seek care-at-home. In order to remove this incentive, the government proposed to abolish the allowance and instead transfer resources by a grant to local authorities. This was intended to promote independence by making available funds with which social services departments could support domiciliary care. This paper examines the potential impact of the proposal from the perspective of front line practitioners and managers. Calculations of the proposal's likely effects in five authorities were made from a simulation of their usual decision-making processes. The results, applied to the national picture, showed only a marginal effect of the change upon admissions to care homes. The potential effect of the change in diverting admissions from care homes was seen to be hampered by organisational influences which vary between authorities.

The concept of wisdom, popularly associated with the idea of old age, was neglected during the 20th century. It has recently revived as a matter of academic concern, but remains imperfectly understood. This article therefore begins to explore both the concept of wisdom and some forms we might expect wise behaviour to take. It emphasises the contemporary relevance of historical approaches through an examination of Hebrew and Greek writing on wisdom. Recent contributions from psychology develop aspects of these traditions; but studying wisdom ethnographically also substantially expands our understanding of what wisdom is. An ethnographic interview from Austria exemplifies social as well as psychological aspects of wisdom, showing that part of the meaning of wisdom resides in its effects on a social setting. Aspects of discourse in rural Ireland, when interpreted in the light of maxim-related wisdom traditions, extend this claim, showing more about how wise interventions activate wisdom in the society surrounding them. Other ethnographic cases also develop this notion of wisdom as based on social interaction, by exploring its effects. If we face the methodological challenges entailed in tracing wisdom ethnographically, we enhance our understanding of the concept itself and stress the fruitfulness of the idea of wisdom as an attainment of the lifecourse.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between traumatic events that arise across the lifecourse and a sense of meaning in later life. In the process, three important issues are evaluated. First, analyses are performed to see if traumatic events at six different points in the lifecourse are associated with a sense of meaning in life. Second, an effort is made to see if current emotional support helps reduce the deleterious effects of trauma on meaning, and whether current levels of negative inter-personal contacts exacerbate the effects of trauma on meaning in life. Third, the relationship between trauma and meaning is assessed in three age cohorts: the young-old, the old-old and oldest-old. Findings from a nationwide United States survey reveal that trauma arising between the ages of 18 and 30 years is associated with a diminished sense of meaning in life, and that current emotional support reduces the effects of trauma on meaning, whereas negative inter-personal contacts tend to intensify the pernicious effects of trauma on meaning in life. Further analyses suggest that the relationships among trauma, emotional support, and negative inter-personal contacts emerge primarily in the oldest-old cohort.

Most adults do not achieve the levels of physical activity currently recommended for a healthy lifestyle. Population surveys suggest that there is a linear decline of activity levels with age, yet physical activity has many health benefits for older adults. If these are to be more widely adopted among older people, health policy and promotion require an understanding of the factors that influence decreasing activity with age. This study examined the patterns of physical activity of 699 participants in the West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study who were aged 60 years when interviewed in 1991 and followed up four to five years later. It examined the factors that influenced whether or not the subjects achieved currently recommended levels of activity, by applying random effects models with a seasonal adjustment. It was found that higher levels of physical activity associated with a healthier lifestyle, and that socio-economic factors played a minor role in determining the level of physical activity. A substantial amount of physical activity occurred at work but was lost by those who had retired, for while those who were not working were more physically active at home or at leisure than those in work, the majority of the sample did too little physical activity outside work to compensate for the loss of work-based activity. One conclusion is that health promotion initiatives that encourage people to become more physically active should be targeted at those who are about to retire.

In this study we apply a lifecourse perspective to an examination of older adults' attitudes about gender roles and moral issues. The study goes beyond previous research in that it examines the relationships between older adults' attitudes and: (a) experiences in the parental home, (b) people's own marital and work experiences through the entire lifecourse, and (c) the marital and work experiences of their children. The sample consists of respondents aged 55 or more years from the ‘Living Arrangements and Social Networks of Older Adults in The Netherlands’ survey of 1992 and the ‘Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam’. It is shown that a large majority of older adults subscribe to the view that people have the freedom to make their own choices about the issues of voluntary childlessness, abortion and euthanasia. Similarly, most older adults favour equality between men and women. Multivariate analyses show that people's attitudes are generally consistent with their lifecourse experiences. It is found that unconventional lifecourse experiences, particularly with respect to childbearing, associate with more progressive attitudes in late life. The behaviour and lifecourse experiences of their children are also related to older adults' attitudes. Particularly, if their children co-habited, older adults tend to be more progressive. These findings suggest that an important mechanism by which societal change may have affected older adults is through their children's experiences.

This paper discusses several changes in mother-daughter relationships in Turkey and their association with changing social conditions. It is based on in-depth interviews with 30 older mothers and their adult daughters. As a country experiencing rapid urbanisation, westernisation, military coups and economic crises, Turkey provides an increasingly changing setting for the investigation of inter-cohort changes in inter-generational relationships. Most of the mothers in the study were born during the 1930s, soon after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. They grew up during an era of material scarcity, restrictive social norms and few opportunities for advancement, and lived in a relatively homogeneous and stable social context. Most of the daughters were born during the 1950s; they grew up at a time of rapid social change and political turmoil but relative material abundance, and were exposed to consumerism and individualistic values that emphasised personal achievement and independence. The ideals and opportunities of the mothers’ youth conflicted with those presented to their children, and the goals of and approaches to parenting became unstable and a source of anxiety. The daughters were caught between their parents’ and their children's demands, which produced conflicts between their ideals and reality, and many experienced internal and inter-personal conflicts. Both mothers and daughters attributed differences in their personalities and parenting styles to the changing times.

This paper reports a study of the situations of disadvantaged older people in contemporary South African townships. It draws from their own accounts that were collected through ethnographic research in day centres and care homes. Most of the informants had experienced a succession of serious material, psychological, social and cultural losses. Their lives had been characterised by violence, inequality, disruption and poverty. A dominant theme in their accounts is that they can hardly ‘get through’ their lives. Their thankless, even alienated, situations are not only a function of personal losses but also have much to do with the recent political and social history of South Africa. The colonial and Apartheid eras have by and large been excluded from the country's collective memory, with the result that older people's experiences of those times are not valued as affirmational reminiscence or for shaping a kin group's common identity. Expressed recollections have acquired a different function, of being a means of articulating moral judgements on the present. The result is that memories, rather than bringing the generations together, have the opposite effect and widen the gap in understanding between the older and younger generations. This in turn has serious effects on older people's wellbeing. The silencing of memories reflects the society's radical break with the past, which has made it difficult for younger people to mourn or sympathise with older people's losses. While far from helpless victims, many of the older township residents lack meaningful frames by which to locate themselves in contemporary South African society.