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.

In the transition to democracy and a market economy, the Central and Eastern European countries experienced rapid and fundamental changes. Large-scale emigration flows and pronounced reductions in previously universal welfare systems increased the phenomenon of ‘left behind’ older adults. We examine this phenomenon in the case of Poland, a rather family-oriented society which in recent years sent most emigrants to Western Europe in absolute terms. Employing a support system framework and representative survey data, we enquire into older adults’ support patterns. Our results suggest that older adults in Poland rely predominantly on family support, although this varies greatly across living arrangements. We also find a positive association between distance separating parents and their closest child, and support from at least one non-kin. Yet, our findings reveal differences between practical and emotional support, with the latter being more likely to be provided by non-kin, but with distance mattering to a lesser degree. Parents with very distant child(ren) are few and differ only from parents with very proximate child(ren), a finding prompting the question as to what is the difference between being ‘left behind’ by international and by internal migration. We conclude that the phenomenon of ‘left behind’ in Poland, at least in terms of support, is less a matter of children's migration and more an issue of household and regional context.

The relationship between living alone, loneliness and social isolation, and how they are associated with health remain contentious. We sought to explore typologies based on shared experiences of loneliness, social isolation and living alone using Latent Class Analysis and determine how these groups may differ in terms of their physical and mental health. We used Wave 7 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (N = 7,032; mean age = 67.3) and responses to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) loneliness scale, household composition, participation in social/societal activities plus frequency of contact with friends, family and relatives for the Latent Class Analysis. The optimal number of groups was identified using model-fit criteria. The socio-demographic characteristics of groups and health outcomes were explored using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. We identified a six-cluster typology: Group 1, no loneliness or isolation; Group 2, moderate loneliness; Group 3, living alone; Group 4, moderate isolation; Group 5, moderate loneliness, living alone; and Group 6, high loneliness, moderate isolation (with high likelihood of living alone). Groups experiencing loneliness and/or isolation were more likely to report poorer physical and mental health even after adjusting for socio-demographic confounders, this was particularly notable for Group 6. Our results indicate that different typologies of living alone, loneliness and isolation can be identified using data-driven techniques, and can be differentiated by the number and severity of issues they experience.

This study investigates the relationship between the provision of informal care to older parents/parents-in-law and the employment status of adult children in mid-life. The study analyses unique panel data for a cohort of individuals born in 1958 in Britain, focusing on respondents at risk of providing care (i.e. with at least one surviving parent/parent-in-law) and in employment at 50. Logistic regression is used to investigate the impact of caring at 50 and 55 on employment status at 55, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, the respondent's health status and their partner's employment status. Separate models examine (a) the likelihood of exiting the labour force versus continuing work, and (b) amongst those continuing in work, the likelihood of reducing hours of employment. Different types of care (personal, basic and instrumental support) are distinguished, along with hours of caring. The results highlight that providing care for more personal tasks, and for a higher number of hours, are associated with exiting employment for both men and women carers. In contrast, the negative impact of more intense care-giving on reducing working hours was significant only for men – suggesting that women may juggle intensive care commitments alongside work or leave work altogether. Facilitating women and men to combine paid work and parental care in mid-life will be increasingly important in the context of rising longevity.

Active participation in social activities is important for the wellbeing of older adults. This study explored benefits of active social engagement by evaluating whether relationships that comprise active involvement (e.g. co-engagement in activities) bring more social benefits (i.e. social support, companionship, positive social influence) than other relationships that do not involve co-engagement. A total of 133 adults ages 60 years and older living in a rural Midwestern city in the United States of America were interviewed once and provided information on 1,740 social network members. Among 1,506 social relationships in which interactions occurred at least once a month, 52 per cent involved engagement in social activities together and 35 per cent involved eating together regularly. Results of the generalised linear mixed model showed that relationships involving co-engagement were significantly more likely to also convey social support (i.e. emotional, instrumental, informational), companionship and social influence (encouragement for healthy behaviours) than relationships that do not involve co-engagement. Having more network members who provide companionship was associated with higher sense of environmental mastery, positive relations with others and satisfaction with social network. Interventions may focus on maintaining and developing such social relationships and ensuring the presence of social settings in which co-engagement can occur. Future research may explore whether increasing co-engagement leads to an enhanced sense of companionship and psychological wellbeing.

This paper systematically reviews empirical research published between 2006 and 2016 on the relationship between informal care-giving to elders and labour force participation (LFP). It does so in the context of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development policy responses to population ageing. In this context, conclusions regarding the LFP and care-giving relationship should at least be applicable to the sub-population of working-aged individuals who are most likely to provide informal elder care. Currently, these are women in mid-life and the recipients of their care are mostly extra-residential parents. The review's key conclusion is that mid-life women care-givers of elderly parents are significantly likely to reduce their working hours and also to work fewer hours relative to their non-care-giving counterparts. In drawing this conclusion, the review shows that studies finding only modest care-giving effects on LFP either do not adequately control for care-giving intensity or their conclusions apply to sub-populations less likely to be affected by policies addressing population ageing.

Population ageing and the global burden of dementia pose a major challenge for human societies and a priority for public health. Cognitive enhancement, i.e. the targeted amplification of core cognitive abilities, is raising increasing attention among researchers as an effective strategy to complement traditional therapeutic and assistive approaches, and reduce the impact of age-related cognitive disability. In this paper, we discuss the possible applicability of cognitive enhancement for public health purposes to mitigate the burden of population ageing and dementia. After discussing the promises and challenges associated with enhancing ageing citizens and people with cognitive disabilities, we argue that global societies have a moral obligation to consider the careful use of cognitive enhancement technologies as a possible strategy to improve individual and public health. In addition, we address a few primary normative issues and possible objections that could arise from the implementation of public health-oriented cognitive enhancement technologies.

In the face of population ageing, Western health-care systems are currently demonstrating an immense interest in mobilising older people's potentials. With this agenda in mind, several countries have introduced reablement: a type of home care aimed at mobilising older people's potentials for independence by means of short-term training programmes. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Denmark's home care sector, this paper explores how elder-care professionals translate the abstract notion of ‘potentiality’ into practice. Theoretically, the paper draws on Annemarie Mol's term ‘logic of care’. I demonstrate that professionals draw on two co-existing logics of care: a logic of reablement encapsulating ideals of successful ageing and life-long development; and a logic of retirement, which in contrast allows people at the end of life to retreat and engage in enjoyable activities. Professionals manage to balance these logics in order to live up to policy obligations while at the same time complying with moral standards of good care. However, very little is achieved in terms of increased independence. I argue that by narrowly focusing on bodily and quantifiable potentials, the ‘potentiality paradigm’ holds the risk of deeming older people to lack potential. In conclusion, I therefore encourage a more inclusive approach to elder-care and ageing that recognises the complexities of ageing, including older people's potentials for retreat and leisure.

Assistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people with dementia and their carers within everyday practice. This paper explores how people with dementia and carers use technologies in order to manage care. Findings are reported from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 13 people with dementia and 26 family carers. Readily available household technologies were used in conjunction with and instead of AT to address diverse needs, replicating AT functions when doing so. Successful technology use was characterised by ‘bricolage’ or the non-conventional use of tools or methods to address local needs. Carers drove AT use by engaging creatively with both assistive and everyday technologies, however, carers were not routinely supported in their creative engagements with technology by statutory health or social care services, making bricolage a potentially frustrating and wasteful process. Bricolage provides a useful framework to understand how technologies are used in the everyday practice of dementia care, and how technology use can be supported within care. Rather than implementing standardised AT solutions, AT services and AT design in future should focus on how technologies can support more personalised, adaptive forms of care.

This article opens the discussion on age asymmetries within the research relationship between researchers who are young and able-bodied and research participants who are much older and have acquired impairments in later life. Based on the knowledge of age relations, we present our conceptualisation of power imbalances based on age. We see these asymmetries as co-existing with other forms of power imbalances between researchers and participants, and argue that these asymmetries are not the results of the limitations of the older adults but rather the consequences of different constellations of possibilities for researchers and participants. Moreover, we assert that taking these asymmetries into account is a necessary step when conducting research with people with acquired impairment in later life. As researchers, reflecting on age asymmetries helped us to avoid othering our research participants and prevented us from marginalising their life experiences. Drawing upon our own research, we reflect upon the network of cognitive, physical and social asymmetries that emerged in our research relationships and identify the main challenges that we faced. In the presence of some of these age asymmetries, we approach the research relationship through the roles which we played vis-à-vis the participants. We consider reflecting and addressing these asymmetries to be a necessary step in creating and maintaining a research relationship based on equality. Only a reflexive and transparent approach to these power imbalances can ensure that data collection and analysis do not contribute to their reproduction. This article presents some general insights on research practices and contributes to the debate on power imbalances in qualitative research. The article also contributes to gerontology and provides new insights about the lives of those individuals with acquired impairment in later life, a topic that has so far received inadequate research attention.

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 light of an increased ageing population, policy makers are faced with the urgent problem of planning programmes that reflect active ageing or, in other words, the promotion of activities that help individuals to remain active in a societal context. The construct of agency, defined as the capacity to make decisions and to address situations depending on the individual's future plans, reflects a specific normative criterion: individuals are expected to live in an active and productive way, while those who are unable to live up to this expectation are considered dependent, passive, unproductive, weak. From a social constructionist perspective, the current study proposes a critical reflection on the qualities usually attributed to the construct of agency that are liable to appear reductive and oppressive when applied to an elderly population. Once the basic premises underlying agency, as it is commonly defined in the Western tradition, have been deconstructed, a different conceptualisation, based on interviews with older individuals, will be presented. The current work aims to produce a different conceptual framework that will permit examination of experiences and organisational modalities of agency typifying later life. The comments made by the interviewees in many cases resonate with ideas contained in Taoist philosophy and, more specifically, with the concept of disponibilité (or disponibility) outlined by the French sinologist François Jullien, which we discuss here.

The aim of this study is to explore how community-dwelling older people with cognitive problems and their care-givers (dyads) perceive their own social participation, how care-givers evaluate the social participation of the people they care for and what factors they perceive as influential. In this qualitative study, we performed 13 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with dyads who participated in the Social Fitness Programme. We used content analysis to analyse the interviews thematically. Social participation perceptions include changes over time and a discrepancy in perspectives. All the people with cognitive problems and most care-givers perceived a decreased social participation. Most people with cognitive problems answered that they were satisfied, in contrast to most care-givers who were dissatisfied with the decreased social participation of the people they cared for. Analysing the influencing factors resulted in five themes: behavioural, physical, social environmental, physical environmental and activity-related. People with cognitive problems and their care-givers displayed a discrepancy in social participation perspectives. This becomes a major dilemma, especially for younger care-givers. A key element is a sometimes deliberate choice of people with cognitive problems to refrain from social participation to protect themselves from the consequences of cognitive problems and from encounters with others. This highlights the dynamics of social participation as an interaction between personal factors and the social and physical environment in which social participation occurs.

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.

Digital storytelling provides older adults with an opportunity to become digital producers, connect with others through story and explore their life history. The authors report on the results of a digital storytelling project for older adults. The study investigated the experiences and perceived benefits of older adults who created digital stories during a ten-week course and explored the reactions of story viewers to the digital stories they viewed during a special sharing event. Eighty-eight older adult participants in Metro Vancouver who attended one of 13 courses offered were included in the study. Most of the participants were female and over half were immigrants. Results from the focus group interviews demonstrated a rich array of reported social and emotional benefits experienced through the process of creating a digital story within the course. Three main themes emerged: social connectedness through shared experience and story, reminiscence and reflecting on life, and creating a legacy. Viewers who attended a ‘Sharing Our Stories’ event reported that the stories were meaningful, well constructed and invoked a range of emotions. The researchers conclude that digital storytelling may help digital storytellers increase connectedness to others and to self. Additionally, this connectedness may extend over time through the process of examining the past to create a digital story that can serve as a legacy to connect to future generations.

How do non-Western societies envisage the relationship between the body and ageing? The present work aimed to shed light on this question by exploring how adult men and women of different ages living in Dakar, Senegal, view their bodies. A quantitative methodology was selected, and this study was carried out on a sample of 1,000 dwellers of the Senegalese capital, aged 20 and older. This sample was constructed using the quota method in order to strive for representativeness. Results indicate that appearance was highly important for Senegalese women and men, and for younger and older adults alike. As in Western cultures, beauty and youth were strongly connected. The large majority of Senegalese women and men were satisfied with their looks across the lifespan. However, older women were slightly less satisfied, consistent with the double standard hypothesis. Little discrepancy was found between felt age and chronological age throughout the entire lifecourse, arguing against an ageless self hypothesis in this African population. The mask of ageing hypothesis was also rejected, as men's and women's identification with their body did not diminish significantly across age. These observations from an African perspective call for greater attention to the ageing process in non-Western societies in order to challenge hypotheses developed in Western societies and understand more broadly the role of culture.

The concurrent ageing of parental care-givers and people with intellectual disabilities is driving academic and social welfare concern for a post-parental care ‘crisis’. The ‘crisis’ typically pertains to a transition from primary care in the family home precipitated by the death or incapacity of older parents without a pre-planned pathway to post-parental care. This crisis is amplified in rural communities given low service engagement with families and a deficit of disability-supported accommodation and services. Academics, service providers and policy makers have responded through a problematisation of post-parental care planning. This focus continues to normalise informal care, burdens families with responsibility for planning, and diverts attention from structural deficits in the socio-political carescape. This paper attends to the Australian policy landscape in which long-term care-giving for families living with intellectual disability is enmeshed. It contends that the dyadic and didactic model of informal long-term care has profound implications for social service support and post-parental care planning. Problematisation of carers’ ‘need’ to relinquish primary care and for people with intellectual disabilities to transition to independent and supported living is necessary to unsettle the dominant policy and service discourse around the provision of services to sustain informal care-giving. Innovation is then needed to forge pathways of support for families in rural communities planning on continuing, transitioning and transforming care arrangements across the lifespan.

The number of older parents ageing in tandem with their adult children with intellectual disability (ID) is increasing. This unique situation calls for greater research that investigates how older parents experience this extended care-giving role, including the extent to which they are engaging in futures planning. Participants were recruited via disability service providers in South Australia. Using the theoretical perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology to understand lived experiences, semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out with older parents (N = 17, mean age 70 years). Six offspring were living in the family home while the remainder were in supported accommodation. Main themes to emerge from the data were: (a) perpetual parenting, (b) costs and rewards and (c) planning to plan. Parents were providing care across a range of areas, regardless of whether their offspring lived at home or in supported accommodation. While aware of the need to plan for the future, most did not have a firm plan in place. Parents are providing a high level of support to their adult children with ID regardless of whether they live in supported accommodation or the family home. While some have started to think about future care arrangements, most appear unclear over what the future holds.

This study explores how living arrangements influence perceived quality of life in an elderly population in rural South Africa. We use data from the longitudinal World Health Organization Study of Global Ageing and Adult Health Survey (WHO-SAGE) and from the Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS). On average, older men and women who reside in single-generation and complex-linked multigenerational households report worse quality of life than those in two-generation and linear-linked multigenerational households. However, after controlling for prior wellbeing status, we find living arrangements to have a significant impact on women's perceived quality of life only, and that it is moderated by age. We conclude that not all multigenerational arrangements are protective of older adults’ wellbeing and highlight the gendered impact of living arrangements on quality of life. These results suggest the necessity to understand how living arrangements influence the social roles of older adults and change with age.

Earlier research on residential mobility has demonstrated a tendency for the young old of the 55+ population to prefer peripheral locations, whereas older age groups choose central locations. Here, we present survey results indicating that such late-adulthood differences in preferences are supported by age-related shifts corresponding to differences in housing preferences expressed by individuals in peripheral as well as central locations in Sweden. A sample of 2,400 individuals aged 55 years and over was asked to select the seven most important characteristics of a dwelling from a list of 21 alternatives (Survey of Housing Intentions among the ELDerly in Sweden (SHIELD), 2013). The preferences expressed were used as dependent variables in logistic regressions to determine to what extent the housing preferences of older people are linked to age, gender, socio-economic status and type of geographical area. The results demonstrated a close link between neighbourhood characteristics and housing preferences. Owning the dwelling, having a garden and access to nature were stressed as important by individuals living in non-metropolitan middle-class areas and in suburban elite areas. The youngest cohort expressed similar preferences. Older age groups instead stressed the importance of an elevator, single-storey housing and a good design for independent living; preferences that have similarities to those expressed by individuals living in large cities and smaller urban centres where such housing is more readily available.