Older people are among the most vulnerable in major disasters. In their aftermath, it is crucial to institute efforts that will maintain a high level of elders' quality of life (QoL). This paper presents QoL assessments of elderly survivors five years after the Bam earthquake in Iran, and evaluates the determinants. A cross-sectional analysis of 210 randomly-selected survivors was carried out in 2008 using the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire. A comparison of the results with data on the general population showed that experiencing the earthquake may adversely affect psychological dimensions of QoL even five years after, but paradoxically the earthquake resulted in better social relationships in affected communities than in the general population. Lower QoL associated with female gender, higher age, living alone, severe earthquake-related injury, poor quality of living conditions, increased dependency in the activities of daily living, living in an urban area, and being temporarily housed. Recovery experts and donors should carry out long-term monitoring of health status and QoL in disaster-affected communities, with a focus on psychological wellbeing. Intervention programmes that emphasise post-disaster quality of care and satisfactory housing may lead to better QoL of the victims and may shorten the recovery phase.

The concept of ‘active ageing’ has received much attention through strategic policy frameworks such as that initiated by the World Health Organisation, and through government and non-governmental organisation initiatives. The primary goal of these initiatives is to encourage older people to be active and productive, and to enhance quality of life, health and wellbeing. It is well known that with increasing age, night-time sleep deteriorates, which has implications for how older people maintain activity levels, and leads to an increased propensity for day-time sleep. Using data from 62 interviews with people aged 65–95 years living in their own homes who reported poor sleep, this paper explores the meanings of day-time sleep, and how the attitudes and practices of ‘active ageing’ are intricately linked to the management of day-time sleep and bodily changes that arise from the ageing process. The desire to be active in later life led to primarily dichotomous attitudes to day-time sleep; older people either chose to accept sleeping in the day, or resisted it. Those who accepted day-time sleep did so because of recognition of decreasing energy in later life, and an acknowledgement that napping is beneficial in helping to maintain active lives. Those who resisted day-time sleep did so because time spent napping was regarded as being both unproductive and as a negative marker of the ageing process.

The delivery of services and benefits to people supporting older and disabled relatives and friends depends largely on their identification within constructs of ‘care-giving’ and ‘carer’. Those who are married or living with a partner may be particularly resistant to adopting the identity of ‘care-giver’ or ‘care receiver’. This paper investigates the circumstances of couples and their adoption of carer identities, drawing on a study of the financial implications of a partner's death. That study was based on over 750 couples where one partner died, drawn from the British Household Panel Survey, and separate qualitative interviews with people whose partner died in the previous two years. The findings show that carer self-identification was influenced by the partner's health-care needs and service contacts, including welfare benefits receipts. None of the socio-demographic factors considered was statistically linked to whether people described themselves as providing care for their partner, unless there was an underlying association with the partner's health-care needs. The findings underline the problems of using self-reported identities in surveys and estimates of take-up of services and benefits, and the difficulties of delivering entitlements to people who care for their partner at the end-of-life. A challenge for policy makers is how to move beyond formal categories of ‘carer’ and ‘care-giving’ to incorporate inter-dependence, emotional commitment and the language of relationships in planning support for frail older people.

Drawing on data from a qualitative study, this paper explores the impact of ‘village services’ on the lives of people aged 70 or more years living in rural England. Throughout the paper, the phrase ‘village services’ refers to six community-based services and activities provided to help meet the needs of older rural residents, namely lunch clubs, welfare rights information and advice services, befriending schemes and community warden support, in rural areas in three regions of England. It is argued that, in various ways, village services promote social inclusion by enhancing older rural residents' access to the resources, rights, goods and services that encourage social interaction and meaningful participation in community life. It is clear, however, that the overwhelming majority of users of village services are female, that older men are often reluctant to engage with the services on offer, and that the providers of village services need to find new and innovative ways of engaging with older men in rural areas. It is concluded that restricted revenue and capital resources means that the expansion of village services so that they may better meet the requirements of older rural men is unlikely.

Older people in Korea have a higher risk of poverty than younger adults, but the dynamics of income changes around the time of retirement have received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining changes in the level and sources of income around the time of retirement, with retirement being defined as separation from one's main lifetime employment. It uses longitudinal data from the Korean Labour and Income Panel Study's Waves 1–9, and follows 580 younger retirees aged at least 50 years who retired during 1998–2005. The paper demonstrates that the prevalence of low income across the retirement transition was related to gender, previous career status and current working status. In particular, there was a noticeable increase in the prevalence of low income among permanent retirees compared to those who continued working in retirement. It also examines different factors associated with the individuals' economic wellbeing after retirement, and finds that working status in retirement is indeed the factor that most influences the probability of low-income entry among male retirees, while for women, the nature of co-residence with working household member(s) and household assets most mattered. From this, the paper concludes that being in paid work after retirement remains an important substitute for the immature old-age safety-net in Korea.

This paper considers the social symbolism of hair, how it is managed and styled in later life, and what attitudes to appearance in general and hairstyling in particular reveal about ageism in contemporary culture. The paper draws on findings from a two-year, nationwide, participative study of age discrimination in the United Kingdom, the Research on Age Discrimination (RoAD) project. Using data collected by qualitative methods, including participant diaries and interviews undertaken by older field-workers, the paper explores narratives of image and appearance related to hair and associated social responses. The paper focuses on older people's accounts of the dual processes of the production of an image and consumption of a service with reference to hairdressing – and the dilemmas these pose in later life. The findings are considered in the context of the emerging debate on the ageing body. The discussion underlines how the bodies of older people are central to their experience of discrimination and social marginalisation, and examines the relevance of the body and embodiment to the debate on discrimination. A case is made for further scrutiny of the significance of hairdressing to the lives of older people and for the need to challenge the assumption that everyday aspects of daily life are irrelevant to the policies and interventions that counter age discrimination and promote equality.

The aim of this article is to analyse 20 Finnish working carers' perceptions of their sibling relations and the sharing of the responsibility for parental care. The main focus is on the interviewees' rationales for the participation or non-participation of their siblings in the parents' care. Almost all the interviewed carers stated that the division of care responsibilities is unequal and that they are the primary carers, but the majority did not convey any clear intention to try to persuade their siblings to increase their participation in parental care. In many cases, the siblings were described either as entirely absent or as providing occasional backup, but some interviewees reported that caring for the parent(s) was shared with their other siblings. Consequently, three participation patterns were identified: ‘absence’, ‘backup’ and ‘togetherness’. All the interviewees offered rationales for the unequal division of care tasks and responsibilities among the siblings. The discussion focuses on these rationales and their variations by participation patterns, and considers the similarity of the findings to those from previous American and British studies. The study concludes that social-care services should take the primary carer's siblings into consideration, although not always as a ‘resource’. It should not be taken for granted or assumed that the primary care-giver receives help from her or his siblings, even if their relationship is otherwise close and unproblematic.

Retrogenesis is claimed to be the process by which degenerating mechanisms in the brain, as found in Alzheimer's disease (AD), reverse the order of acquisition of functions, including language, in normal child development. In FAST (Functional Assessment Staging of Alzheimer's disease) stages of AD are translated into corresponding developmental ages. Humour, irony and sarcasm are communicative strategies linked to meta-linguistic abilities developed late in childhood. If found in the conversation of people with moderately severe AD according to FAST, this could be an indication of problems in the FAST scale and subsequently in the concept of retrogenesis concerning speech and language abilities. Comprehensive, open-ended, naturalistic conversations between three nursing home residents with moderately severe AD according to FAST and their professional care-givers were analysed with concepts developed in linguistics as to the occurrence of humour, irony and sarcasm. Although the data material was limited, the findings indicate an unexpected communicative competence of the three participants. This is a corrective to retrogenesis and a caveat for poor expectations of intelligible conversations with demented people for professionals and the people they advise. Implications for research strategies and for the general knowledge of communicative competence in AD are addressed in the discussion section, and possible ways of elucidating deterioration of speech and language abilities in AD are suggested.