Past twenty-one years of age, a striking new cover and a new editor: is Ageing & Society about to be radically transformed? Not at all, but over the next five years it will aim to be even better at the things it has been doing well. To stretch the life course analogy, having reached a ‘mature age’ and with an accomplished juvenilia, the paths that promise most are well defined. The achievement to date has been impressive, and the strong foundation creates a larger potential. It is in this context and spirit that I take up the editorship in succession to Bill Bytheway. The editorial policy will of course be frequently re-examined and refined, but neither the editorial board nor I wish to see the journal's core ambitions and values change. My aims are to help authors achieve these to an even higher standard, and particularly to raise the title's reputation for originality, for the quality of the research that it reports, and for its standards of communication. The goal is to raise the ‘impact’ of Ageing & Society, in citation indicators and, more importantly, in its contributions to understanding and to the formation of opinion and policy.

Since 1989 there has been a widespread collapse of public services and income support for older people in the Russian Federation. Pensions have declined in real value and frequently are paid late, the system of collective health care has become less reliable, and the social institutions and services that formerly helped disadvantaged older people overcome isolation and loneliness have almost entirely ceased to function. Most people's personal assets and savings are insufficient for a decent life, and many cannot now afford the medical services and medications that they need. Given the absence of formal or institutional support, older people in Russia have had to develop pragmatic coping mechanisms, most commonly based on informal social networks and diverse income-generating activities, including barter and exchange in the informal ‘grey’ and ‘black’ economies. The household budgets of many pensioners increasingly rely upon their ability to raise income through their labour and the exchange of goods, and the time that they devote to these productive activities is increasing sharply. In comparison with other age groups, older people in Russia own many private apartments, garages, and garden or allotment plots, and they are important factors in the generation of income. These assets are used first and foremost to avert poverty and degradation, and more generally to support the immediate and extended family. The current economic system and the inadequacies of the existing system of social protection perpetuate the distinctive coping strategies.

This paper summarises current research on the mental health status of older African-Americans with a specific focus on late-life depression, one of the most common forms of mental disorder among older persons. Social gerontologists have brought to the forefront the need to consider the impact of historical eras, cohort location, and lifecourse development when studying various dimensions of the ageing process. Unfortunately, this type of theorising is still in its infancy, and has not been widely applied to the general population and all dimensions of health, let alone investigations into the mental health status of older African-Americans. Virtually none of the empirical studies we reviewed adequately address the historical, biographical, or structural factors related to the mental health status of older African-Americans. We suggest that to understand contemporary manifestations of racial presumptions, there must be an appreciation of the historical antecedents. African-Americans live with the corrosive effects of a legacy of slavery that presumed black inferiority. The identification of salient factors of risk and resilience among this population is critical to developing effective intervention and mental health maintenance programmes. By emphasising the socio-historical influences on the mental health of older African-Americans, we can develop a greater understanding of this population's mental health needs; thus paving the way for improved mental health services and a reduction in mental health disparities.

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the innovative nursing home voucher scheme that was introduced by the Valencia Autonomous Region of Spain in the early 1990s to implement targets laid down by the national plan for the development of older people's services. The article begins with a review of the evolution of Spanish social services, and especially the nursing home sector, and then summarises the genesis, objectives and characteristics of the voucher scheme. The main part of the paper reports a performance analysis and economic evaluation of the programme. On the basis of detailed information over four years, it is concluded that nursing home vouchers have contributed to the increased supply of publicly-financed rooms, have promoted equality of access to the service, and have increased user choice. It is also shown, however, that while vouchers can lead to an increase in the quality of inputs, they increase utilisation and expenditure. In the absence of the monitoring or reporting data that would be required, it is not possible to determine whether the scheme has increased efficiency, in the sense of improving the quality of life of frail older people at reasonable and containable cost.

Little is known about the income dynamics of retirement in Britain, in part because of a lack of data. The information is of some topical interest given the growing number of older people, the trend towards earlier retirement, the decline in the value of the basic state pension, the growing reliance on occupational and private pensions, and continuing relatively high poverty rates among people in old age. This paper considers the important question of income and retirement and, in particular, the association between transitions into retirement and the probability of becoming poor. It is based on longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey waves 1–9, covering 1991–1999. We also relate differences in poverty entry probabilities among the retired to differences in factors such as a retiree's health, housing tenure, age and sex, education, labour market status and history, household composition and spouse's characteristics.

Fundamental shifts in state intervention in recent years have resulted in steady curtailment in public provision of community and social care. A longitudinal study of elderly women receiving home care in Ontario explored the reverberations of these shifts in the texture of frail elderly people's lives. Three distinct accounts of negotiating unstable and rationed home care were discernible. Taking charge was an active account of women successfully impressing their particular needs and identities on home care provision. Pushed over the edge was a vulnerable account of insufficient and depersonalised care in which participants felt themselves practically and emotionally out of control. In Restraining expectations, women adjusted silently to the shortcomings of home care, stoically making themselves smaller as they found their previous orbits and identities unsupported. Home care's front line emerged as a complex site of struggle for identity and agency – a struggle in which elderly people engage with inventiveness and determination but also with dwindling support, few witnesses and in mounting isolation.

Care management has become a key component in the development of community-based care in many countries, and this paper examines the different care management arrangements for older people's services that are now emerging. It has been United Kingdom government policy since 1989 that the providers of social services develop care management systems, as confirmed in the White Paper, Modernising Social Services. The paper opens with the background to the policy changes and a discussion of the role of care management in the British social care system. Secondly, evidence from the early phases of care management development is examined; and thirdly, the evidence from a major national study of care management arrangements for older people on the patterns of variation on key dimensions is considered.

This paper examines the meaning of social dancing for older people. It is based on a one-year qualitative research project, which is seeking to explore the experiences of social dance for people aged 60 years or more who attend various dance events in Essex and south-east London. The findings suggest that the social dance experience is not only or simply a beneficial physical experience for older people, it also bestows other significant benefits for those who enter the third age and beyond. It can provide continuity within change. It offers an opportunity to be sociable and have fun in ways that both reflect, and avowedly move beyond, the dancers' teenage years. It promotes a welcome sense of a community spirit. It is a way of becoming visible and aesthetically pleasing, and it bestows a sense of worth and achievement in skills learnt through dancing. Last but not least, dancers can experience the joy of a fit and able body in both real and mythic senses.

In the study of ageing, community has increasingly become a topic of interest. Ageing studies are certainly not alone in this, for the same is widely true in the contemporary American social sciences. More and more research, often quite theoretical, suggests that we must raise the sense of community to achieve improvements in the quality of life. In gerontology, over the past decade studies of nursing homes and housing settings have burgeoned. For the most part, however, analyses have focused on the need for community through social integration, while the underlying question, of how community is formed through social interaction, has been neglected. Community, as discussed here, grows out of interaction in a local setting. The interaction is based on a shared or common knowledge of the site's occupants. In essence, community is not so much a site or location per se, but rather the activity of converting a site into a shared collectivity. In this article, the specific mechanisms through which community is formed in a senior, government-supported housing complex are documented. Using data from fieldwork in the neighbourhood, it is argued that, at this site, community is formed through talk about the neighbourhood's commonly recognised troubles. An important component of this ‘troubles talk’ is the celebrity status of two residents. Talk about them is an important component of the elaboration and elucidation of the commonalities that bind the residents together.

Older people in a rural Ghanaian community indicated that they look forward to death. Traditional ideas of ancestorhood, reincarnation and modern Christian beliefs about life after death had little influence on their resignation. Images of a possible ‘hereafter’ hardly existed. Agnosticism – in a religious guise – prevailed. They saw death foremost as a welcome rest after a long and strenuous life. Their readiness for death did not, however, include an acceptance of euthanasia. Both the young and the old held the view that life and death are and should remain in God's hands. This article is based on anthropological fieldwork in the rural town of Kwahu-Tafo in southern Ghana.

This paper takes the old-age pension system in Israel as a test case to examine the implications of proposals for pension reform now being debated or implemented in many welfare states. For over a decade, high on the agenda of decision-makers on both national and international levels, there has been the notion of moving towards a changing ‘partnership in pensions’ or, to put it more bluntly, towards greater privatisation of social security. Virtually since its emergence in the 1950s, the Israeli old-age pension has been based primarily upon a mix of low universal state pensions and income-related private occupational pensions. This paper compares the British and Israeli social security systems for older people in the wake of the reforms recently introduced in Britain and analyses the implications of the Israeli structure on the distribution of social security spending and on the wellbeing of different categories of older individuals.

Risk is frequently invoked in contemporary accounts of ill health, but its construction is often constrained by a rationalist perspective that focuses on physical causes and functional outcomes, and that presents risk as external to the self and predictable. This paper describes an empirical study of the ways in which risk was realised and managed in a day hospital for older people. An ethnographic approach, with participant observation and semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis were used to explore these issues with the staff and fifteen users. Whilst the service providers were orientated to the management of physical risk, as through the regimes for administering medication and their attention to risk reduction in the physical environment, the service users were more concerned with the risk to their personal and social identities, and they more frequently described its manifestations in inter-personal exchanges, sometimes as infantalisation and stereotyping. The paper develops this understanding of the potential for falls among older people to elucidate a broader interpretation of risk, and reveals that it is commonly constructed as a challenge to a person's self-image and identity. Such constructions help to explain older people's responses to complex health problems and to the services and treatments that attempt to solve them.

In Europe, older women are more likely than older men to be living in poverty, and the contrast is directly related to their domestic roles and labour market position during earlier phases of their life courses. Despite Sweden's well-developed social security system, the generalisation applies to its older women. This paper examines the current incomes and life courses of 14 middle-aged and older Swedish women who have periodically had to rely on social assistance. Their circumstances and living conditions are considered in relation to their earlier lives and to the contextual conditions of the country's welfare state. Both life course and feminist perspectives are applied. All the interviewed women had been the main carers of their children, and had worked part-time or in low-paid jobs. Their formal employment histories have been the foundation of their vulnerable economic situation in older age, which the Swedish social security system does little to combat. Unless the bases and assumptions of the social security model are changed, there will continue to be many older women who live a life of poverty or near poverty.

The development of health services in England is currently shaped by three key factors: the active involvement of front-line health professionals (particularly family doctors – general practitioners) in decisions about resource allocation and service development priorities; the promotion of ‘partnerships’ between health and other organisations in order to deliver ‘joined-up’ services; and the close performance management of organisations and professionals to ensure that they meet externally prescribed objectives and targets. This paper considers the implications and impact of these factors on the development of services for older people. It discusses whether, under these circumstances, health service developments are likely to address some of the most pressing needs of older people.

Transfers of assistance from older to younger family members are an important, though often ignored, component of intergenerational exchanges. The ability to help younger family members, either financially or practically, may be influenced by the health and socio-economic status of older parents, but very little is known about these patterns. This article examines the effects of socio-economic and health status on the help that late mid-life parents in Britain and the United States give their children with money, domestic tasks, and grandchild care. Results for the different types of family support yield three main findings. First, there are relatively few differences between Britain and the USA in the factors affecting the provision of support. Secondly, socio-economic factors appear to be more important among married respondents while health is more important among the unmarried. Thirdly, children's co-residence has greater effects on the provision of domestic task help in Britain than in the United States.

There has been an increasing interest in the caring responsibilities of middle generation individuals as numerous studies have noted the continuing family obligations of people in later life. Employing data from the United Kingdom Office of National Statistics Retirement Survey of 1988/89, we examined social class differentials in the provision of care by 55–69 year olds. Our results show few social class differences in the provision of co-resident care to a parent (among those aged 55–69 in 1988/89 with at least one living parent), but significant social class differences in the provision of care to a spouse. Working class individuals were more likely to be caring for a spouse than their middle class counterparts because of the higher prevalence of disability among this group.

After a review of current conceptual models used in nutrition studies, we develop and test a ‘Dietary Change Model’ based on a sample of older rural adults. Predictor variables include socio-demographic, social network, and nutritional risk/support constructs; mediating variables include number of dietary changes attempted and whether the changes are successfully made; and criterion variables focus on psychosocial outcomes. The model is tested on a sample of 298 randomly selected respondents aged 60 years or more residing in five rural communities in Oregon. We find that those most likely to make dietary changes are women, married, and living in smaller households. The social network factors of density, range, and frequency of interaction negatively impact healthy dietary change. Among the most important nutritional support factors to have positive effects on dietary change are having a physician recommend changes in diet, and participating in a community food programme (women only). Successfully changing diet most clearly related to life satisfaction; results of other criterion variables were often complicated by marked gender differences.

Loneliness has been consistently identified as one of the specific ‘social problems’ which accompanies old age and growing older: 90 per cent of the general population of Britain feel that loneliness is a problem associated with old age. There is a widespread presumption that loneliness and isolation have become more prevalent in Britain in the period since the Second World War as a result of the decline in multi-generation households and changes in family structure. This paper examines the accuracy of this stereotype and considers if current cohorts of older people are more likely to report experiencing loneliness than previous generations of elders, through a comparative analysis of historical and contemporary data. Historical data are provided by three ‘classic’ social surveys undertaken in England between 1945 and 1960. Contemporary data are from a postal survey of 245 people aged 65–74 living in South London in 1999. The questions used in all four surveys were comparable, in that respondents self-rated their degree of loneliness on scales ranging from never to always. The overall prevalence of reports of loneliness ranged from five to nine per cent and showed no increase. Loneliness rates for specific age or gender sub-groups were also stable. Reported loneliness amongst those living alone decreased from 32 per cent in 1945 to 14 per cent in 1999, while the percentages decreased for both those reporting that they were never lonely and that they were ‘sometimes’ lonely.

Early retirement from the labour force has become standard practice for most employees in the industrialised world. However, as a result of the rising costs of early-retirement schemes, curbing the outflow of older workers from the labour force has become a central government policy objective. Early-retirement reforms under which benefits are financed on a more actuarially neutral basis are currently being implemented in The Netherlands. At present it is not clear how older workers will react to these policy reforms. In this article we examine the extent to which (Dutch) older workers are inclined to change their retirement intentions in response to new early-retirement arrangements. On the basis of a labour market and a population survey we examine retirement intentions under alternative early-retirement policies. The overall conclusion is that the retirement reform may lead to a substantial delay of the retirement date, but that in practice factors other than financial incentives are powerfully at work. This is also reflected in the long-run early-retirement trend. This trend presents demographers and economists with a puzzle, because while a break can be identified in the time series, it set in before the early-retirement reforms were put into practice.

This article explores the changing nature and patterns of the ‘generational contract’, with particular reference to the exchange of nursing care and housing assets between older parents and their adult children. Inheritance practices and attitudes are used to examine the ways in which socio-economic, demographic and policy changes have recently altered the conventional arrangements in Japanese society. The previously defined ‘generational contract’ is now ambiguous, and the expectations and obligations of different family members are fragmented. This article also discusses whether such practices in Japan are unique and the ways in which they differ from the English situation. Family obligations and inheritance have been more explicitly connected in the Japanese social and legal systems, while in England there is neither legal obligation to support older parents nor any constraint on inheritance. This article elucidates the similarities and differences in the patterns of inheritance and thus the exchange models between care and inheritance in the two societies.