Journal of Aging Studies最新文献

Meaningful work is related to the motivation to continue to work in older ages and later retirement. This qualitative study addresses calls for further research on the meaning of working for older workers using the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis approach to explore in-depth the dimensions underlying the subjective experience of meaningful work among 27 nurses and nursing assistants aged 55–75 years. The findings show that work was perceived as a primary source of: (1) personal identity (2) purpose and contribution, (3) competence and accomplishment, (4) social contacts and belongingness, (5) activity, routines and purposeful use of time, and (6) economic security and freedom. These qualitative findings may be applied in interventions aiming to encourage extended working lives in key welfare occupations, which are facing significant staff shortages.

Many adults face the difficulties of a parent living with dementia. Although not always caregiving for a parent living with dementia, they care about and are concerned for the vulnerability of their parent. This concern is invaluable but often an experience with a far-reaching impact. Qualitative research on filial concerns and experiences of caregiving has resulted in a vast body of knowledge about the experience of family carers. Far less research, however, has examined the moral concern of children. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the normative aspects of their concern. An international collection of 24 books written by adult children about their involvement with an ageing parent was analysed using the Dialogical Narrative Analysis method. Our study shows that the stories deal with children's moral questions about independence, identity, and suffering. These questions can be related to social imaginaries of individualism and progress. The two social imaginaries may have both positive and negative impacts on children's ability to cope with their concern for a parent living with dementia. The moral questions that arise from children's concern seem to originate from both the appeal of the vulnerable parent and from the social imaginaries. These moral sources may compete, resulting in moral friction. Children with a parent living with dementia deliberate upon the personal and societal held beliefs and need moral space to embody their concern.

Age categories are related to perceptions and norms concerning appropriate behaviour, appearances, expectations, and so forth. In Sweden, municipal home care and residential care are commonly referred to as “elder care”, primarily catering to individuals in their 80s or 90s. However, there is no set age limit reserving these services for an older age group.

In intra-professional case conferences, care managers convene with colleagues to discuss care needs and eligibility for elder care services. Despite their significance, these conferences have received limited scholarly attention. The aim of this study was to analyse how care managers categorise persons based on age in intra-professional case conferences when discussing care needs and appropriate support to meet these needs.

The study utilised data from 39 audio-recorded case conferences involving the discussion of 137 different cases, which were analysed using discourse analysis. Our findings showed that chronological age was frequently made relevant and applied in discussions about the appropriateness of usual elder care services.

Four themes emerged, representing how the care managers implicitly and explicitly categorised clients of different chronological ages as typical/normal or atypical/deviant in these discussions: the “too young”, the “not-so-old”, the “old”, and the “extraordinarily old”.

The findings contribute to research on ageing by demonstrating that, in an elder care context, being categorised as atypical/deviant (in terms of being younger) may be more beneficial than being seen as a normal or older elder care recipient. This underscores the importance of further research on the impact of informal age categorisations of clients on actual decisions about welfare services.

This research investigates the representation of older adults in Turkish newspaper reports during the first national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey in order to understand the representation and reinforcement of ageism in this context. To this end, fifty newspaper reports from five top-selling Turkish newspapers at the time were selected randomly and analysed using critical discourse analysis for the text producers' linguistic choices in the representations of older adults. The findings show that the older adults were represented predominantly in relation to the lockdown measures and as members of a homogeneous group. They were mainly evaluated negatively as a vulnerable, passive, and at risk group who lacked truthfulness and exhibited unusual behaviour. They were also found to be not among the intended readers of the newspaper reports. This resulted in the infantilisation of older adults and the removal of their agency. Our findings point to the linguistic choices realising these discursive practices in the Turkish context. We argue that these findings follow a trend of representation of older adults in discursive practices and that these practices are instrumental in forming ageist stereotypes and reinforcing age-related bias.

Ageing in place is an imminent concern for both older couples and communities. Identifying ways to support ageing in place is required to meet the needs and challenges of older couples and social services systems. Through focus groups with a total of 46 participants and a constant comparative methodology, this study aimed to explore and describe the experiences and reasoning of spousal carers, healthcare professionals, and stakeholders regarding possibilities for older couples to age in place. The findings consisted of one main category, ‘Facilitating ageing in place is a win-win situation with challenges’ and four interrelated categories, ‘Focus on older couples – building relationships and providing adequate services’, ‘Engaged civil society as a source of care and social inclusion,’ ‘Motivated professionals with competence and time,’ and ‘Services working together for a sustainable society,’ that present possibilities and challenges for ageing in place. This study suggests that facilitating ageing in place is possible but involves a complex series of challenges that can be linked to different contexts ranging from individuals and couples to civil society, services provided, organisational systems, and existing resources. All these aspects need to be considered and balanced to achieve a situation that contributes to older couples' possibilities to age in place as well as to a sustainable society.

Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby from 2021, a Women's Prize for Fiction nominee, problematizes gender norms by telling the story of three main characters: Reese, a trans woman, Ames, who de-transitioned to live as a man again, and Katrina, a Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is also Ames' lover and boss. Ames and Katrina are expecting a child and are testing the possibilities of having a non-conventional family together with Reese. Parenthood is, thus, the central theme of the novel which structures also the sections of book into the time before the conception and the weeks after it. By doing so, the temporal framework of the novel queers the linearity of heteronormative life courses on the form as well as the content level. Therefore, the interplay of form and content invites to critically investigate how the concept of trans time that challenges linearity and normative conformity (Halberstam, 2005) may provide useful insights into trans aging and the life course through this literary representation. Following, contemporary feminist theorists' commitments to negotiate what makes “life more livable for those whose gender presentation, identity, or bodily experience have been judged abnormal, nonexistent, or impossible” (Karhu, 2022, 304–305), this paper aims at carrying out a critical feminist literary analysis of trans aging, queer life courses and the thereof related gendered norms in Peters' novel. By relying predominantly on feminist poststructuralist theories (Butler 2004) and cultural aging studies (Maierhofer, 2019), it is the aim to challenge normativity and limited social norms through this critical literary reading.

Drawing on qualitative data from a study of older adults' participation in a contemporary dance group, this paper asks what can be gained from new materialist concepts of the older body, and how they can expand cultural gerontological thinking about embodiment. This paper examines the connections between the older body, movement, thoughts, words and spaces, arguing that dance demonstrates that there is a spatial dimension to embodiment. In drawing from models of materiality emerging in gerontology, this paper provides insights about the experience of age, questioning fundamental categorizations promoted in Western culture, and re-thinks agency in relation to the body and space. Emphasising the importance of the material world in the production of the social has important implications in terms of understanding the experience of ageing within an ageist society.

The COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020. The Swiss Federal Council implemented a semi-lockdown in March 2020, asking people, particularly older adults, to stay at home to limit the transmission of the disease and to use digital tools to maintain their social relations and activities. This study inquired how older adults confronting precarity experienced these restrictions, how digital tools functioned in this context, and what learning could therefore be imbibed for the post-pandemic era. We conducted semi-structured telephone interviews with adults aged between 66 and 90 years living in a rural and mountainous Swiss region. The obtained data were subsequently thematically analyzed. The results revealed that the respondents experienced ageism during the semi-lockdown and reported limited or non-existent opportunities to use digital tools to maintain online social contact. This predicament increased their sense of loneliness and amplified their feelings of rejection by the outside world. These observations elucidate the need for the enhancement of non-ageist social support for older people, including individuals with limited social and material resources. We advocate the adoption of innovative initiatives in the post-pandemic era to better include precarious older people in our localities and neighborhoods.

Discussions regarding personhood and dementia care are often based on practices of recognition; on notions of being—or not being— ‘one of us’. This article provides a short overview of personhood as articulated in dementia care, especially in the assemblage of practices known as ‘person-centred care’ (PCC), and in post-human approaches that developed following the critique of PCC. This article posits an alternative framework, based on a rereading of the concept of alienation, that we want to call ‘alienation-centred care’. It considers the extent to which dynamic prosthetic networks can be adapted to the lives of people with dementia, rather than only examining the individual's reactivity to dementia interventions that define traditional approaches. It further urges us to understand the multiple origins of alienating states. Conclusions explore how this framework might address some of the limitations identified in both humanist and post-human approaches to personhood and dementia.