Journal of Aging Studies最新文献

The future will witness the substantial worldwide growth of older people with functional limitations or disabilities who have difficulties leaving their dwellings and traveling to their neighborhoods or other community destinations to realize their obligatory and discretionary needs and goals. This commentary offers conceptual arguments and literature findings proposing that the dwellings of this vulnerable population deserve new scrutiny because they have become more salient and positively experienced places to live where their occupants can maintain their independence and age in place. The catalyst for this commentary is the emergence of gerontechnological innovations relying on digital and sensor technologies, offering these older occupants a new category of dwelling connectivity solutions—constituting a paradigm shift—whereby goods, care, services, social supports, and information and leisure activities can be delivered to their houses and apartments. Incorporating this technological component has transformed their dwellings into dynamic “control centers,” connecting their occupants in real-time with the resources and activities offered in other places. These solutions enable older people to cope more effectively with declines and losses because their ability to live independently is less threatened by challenges they face accessing destinations with inadequate transportation options and less age-friendly land use or physical design features. By occupying more supportive, safer, and connected dwellings, these older people have overall more positive and salient residential mastery emotional experiences and feel more competent and in control of their lives and environment. Planning or policy recommendations directed to the World Health Organization (WHO) and its age-friendly city/community agenda follow from its conclusions. They highlight how dwelling environments containing gerontechnological solutions are becoming more critical influences of “active aging.” The commentary recommends that WHO allocates more resources to dwelling interventions that increase the awareness, availability, usability, and acceptability of these gerontechnological solutions, thus reducing the disincentives for older people to be adopters.

Offering fresh perspectives on the lived experience of ageing in extreme poverty, this article delves into unpacking the relationally driven processes of social, institutional, and self-othering that contribute to agency erosion in older adults. Positing that the context of extreme poverty in which a person ages is micropolitically shaped, where society, institutions, and ageing self interact in a complex way, it is argued that ageing in extreme poverty, inter alia, means ageing in subaltern conditions. A critical consequence of this process is the subjugation of older adults, leading to a life marked by the state of ‘social death’. Additional research is needed to unpack such nuances to better understand ageing processes in extreme poor societies. This necessitates an approach informed by postcolonial perspectives that take into account the dynamics of othering and agency erosion. It concludes by asserting that to reverse extreme poverty among older adults as well as to reverse their subaltern conditions requires a political project that empowers the older adults in society, restores agency and strengthens their ‘relational security’.

What can caring for, and being cared for by, a garden teach us about aging well? This article is a narrative exploration of care, aging, and wellbeing in later life through conversations with an older woman and her garden in Toronto, Canada during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus is on the interconnectedness of care across generations and species. Moving away from conventional generational scripts, the article expands notions of care and aging with an intersectional, feminist and decolonial approach to relationality across time and space.

The article uses interviews, photovoice-inspired sessions, and autoethnography, to look at aging and wellbeing as relational and more-than-human relationality. It extends the ethics of care beyond traditional boundaries, embracing perspectives that challenge normative assumptions of gender, age, and interspecies relations.

The article aims to contribute to the current debates around colonial research logics, though a critical feminist understanding of relationality and embodied learning. It emphasizes the importance of connecting across generations, seeing land as a way to restore human and more-than-human relations while prefiguring a more care-full present.

Having the choice to stay living in one's home and community for as long as possible is a desire of people living with dementia. Yet, for many, this is not a reality due to a lack of appropriate support, unsuitable housing and built environments, social exclusion, and stigma. The global movement called Dementia Friendly Communities aims to address such barriers and bring about positive change. At the local place-based level, Dementia Friendly Community initiatives are typically planned and implemented by committees, yet little is known about how they operate to enact Dementia Friendly Community principles. Using micro-ethnography and a case study approach, two Australian – Queensland Dementia Friendly Community committees and their activities were studied to better understand implementation at the local level. This involved 16 semi-structured interviews, participant observation and field notes identifying goals, approaches, and tensions. While both committees showed the capacity to raise awareness of issues impacting people living with dementia, there were substantial differences in the implementation of the key Dementia Friendly Community principle of inclusion of people living with dementia and carers. Key differences were the way people living with dementia were positioned and the part they were expected to play in committees, whether they were empowered and valued or tokenistically included yet not listened to. Three aspects of practice are central to more meaningful inclusion: engagement, power-sharing, and leadership. Local action groups directed and led by people living with dementia and their carers, with the support of key local people and organizations, help to progress Dementia Friendly Communities locally.

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.