During recent decades, Lebanon has experienced demographic and social changes which, coupled with political instability, have led to waves of youth migration and a higher proportion of older adults living alone. This paper uses the 2004 data of the ‘Pan Arab Project for Family Health’ to assess the levels of various living arrangements and to examine the correlates of living alone, with a focus on economic resources. The findings reveal that 12 per cent of older adults in Lebanon lived alone (17.3 per cent of women and 6.2 per cent of men). Financially better-off older adults and those who reported being satisfied with their income were, respectively, 4.4 and 1.7 times significantly more likely to live alone than their counterparts. The incomes of Lebanese older adults were mainly provided by their children (74.8%) and a relatively small share derived from pension schemes. Contrary to findings from other Arab countries, variations in living arrangements among Lebanese older adults seem to follow the western model whereby wealthier older individuals are more likely to live alone and to be residentially independent. Further studies are warranted to examine to what extent this trend is the result of past migration of adult children who are now established elsewhere and sending remittances home.

Evidence suggests that people with strong social support have lower mortality and morbidity and better self-rated health in later life, but few studies have used longitudinal data to examine the factors that inhibit or enhance social support. This study used both quantitative data and qualitative texts to explore older women's social networks. The mixed-methods design drew participants from the 1921–26 cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH). Regression modelling for repeated measures was used to analyse the longitudinal data. The qualitative data was content analysed by the themes identified from the quantitative analyses. The quantitative analyses revealed that larger social networks associated with better mental health, widowhood, illness or death of a family member, and no mobility problems. Women who were not Australian-born, had sight problems or who had moved house were more likely to have smaller social networks. The qualitative data provided insight into the lived experiences of this group of women. The use of a mixed methodology enabled the longitudinal quantitative results to be enriched by the women's own words. The findings highlight the importance to older women of being able to access their social network members to gain the psychological and emotional benefits.

Previous research on the care-giver burden experienced by adult children has typically focused on the adult child and parent dyad. This study uses information on multiple informal care-givers and examines how characteristics of the informal care-giving network affect the adult child's care-giver burden. In 2007, 602 Dutch care-givers who were assisting their older parents reported on parental and personal characteristics, care activities, experienced burden and characteristics of other informal care-givers. A path model was applied to assess the relative impact of the informal care-giving network characteristics on the care-giver burden. An adult child experienced lower care-giver burden when the informal care-giving network size was larger, when more types of tasks were shared across the network, when care was shared for a longer period, and when the adult child had no disagreements with the other members of the network. Considering that the need for care of older parents is growing, being in an informal care-giving network will be of increasing benefit for adult children involved in long-term care. More care-givers will turn into managers of care, as they increasingly have to organise the sharing of care among informal helpers and cope with disagreements among the members of the network.

Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary working has for long been advocated in gerontology, and sometimes contested. Although collaboration between disciplines is common practice in many areas of ageing research, much remains to be done to develop and support such work. Internationally, funding agencies, scientific associations and other stakeholders in ageing research are actively involved in establishing the methods and means to promote cross-disciplinary co-operation in the field. In the United Kingdom (UK) since the late 1990s, the statutory Research Councils with key interests in ageing and older people have been actively pursuing research programmes that feature multi-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity. The National Collaboration on Ageing Research (NCAR), a partnership among four of the Research Councils to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaboration, worked with scientists, funding bodies, and research users to develop approaches to multi- and inter-disciplinary research, and their work informed the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme, a major cross-Research Council programme of multi-disciplinary research which spans the social, medical, biological and engineering sciences and the arts and humanities. Drawing on the authors' participation in these activities, this article reviews key developments in the promotion of multi-disciplinary science on ageing in the UK and highlights how this is being pursued in the NDA Programme.

In the literature on Alzheimer's disease (AD), scholars have noted how both the disease and the people who are diagnosed as having it have been stigmatised. I argue here that the AD stigma is of a specific sort – it is dehumanisation based on disgust and terror. Although the blame for negative perceptions of people with AD has been placed on the biomedical understanding of dementia, I argue that strong negative emotional responses to AD are also buttressed by the social construction of people with AD as zombies. To illustrate this point, this paper identifies seven specific ways that the zombie metaphor is referenced in both the scholarly and popular literature on AD. This common referencing of zombies is significant as it infuses the social discourse about AD with a politics of revulsion and fear that separates and marginalises those with AD. It is in recognising the power of this zombie trope that its negative impact can be actively resisted through an emphasis of connectedness, commonality, and inter-dependency.

Current approaches to the assessment of cognitive capacity in many jurisdictions seek to balance older people's empowerment with their protection. These approaches incorporate a presumption of capacity, a decision-specific rather than global assessment of that capacity, and an obligation to provide the support needed for adults to make or communicate their own decisions. The implication is that older people are assisted to make decisions where possible, rather than using substitute decision makers. For older people, decision making about financial matters is a contentious domain because of competing interests in their assets and concerns about risk, misuse and abuse. In residential-care settings, older people risk being characterised as dependent and vulnerable, especially in relation to decisions about financial assets. This paper reports an Australian study of the factors that facilitate and constrain residents' involvement in financial decision making in residential settings. Case studies of four aged-care facilities explored how staff interpreted the legislative and policy requirements for assisted and substitute decision making, and the factors that facilitated and constrained residents' inclusion in decisions about their finances. The observed practices reveal considerable variation in the ways that current legislation is understood and implemented, that there are limited resources for this area of practice, and that policies and practices prioritise managing risk and protecting assets rather than promoting assisted decision making.

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the contextual experiencing of humour by community-dwelling older adults. Data for this study consisted of audio-recorded, transcribed interviews with 20 older adults who had participated in a larger study of a number of dimensions associated with the process of ageing. Qualitative coding of the interview content was used to extract salient themes that identified types of humour experienced in different life contexts. The analysis of older adults' narratives about their day-to-day lives yielded four types of experienced humour: affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating, and authentic. Within an inter-personal context, expressing and appreciating humour contributed to sustaining positive social connections. The use of authentic humour and being able to laugh at one's self and life's uncontrollable circumstances appeared to support a positive sense of self and was adaptive for coping with the inevitable losses that accompany the ageing process, such as declining health status. The results of this study suggest that humour expression and appreciation may play an important role in managing the ageing process in ways that are adaptive especially in inter-personal contexts. Possibly health-care providers in both community and institutional settings need to be made aware of the benefits for older adults of experiencing humour in different life contexts.

In this paper we examine associations between the fertility histories of older British women and men and their quality of life using data on a sample of 6,374 men and women born between 1923 and 1949 drawn from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Quality of life in 2001 was measured using scores from the four subscales of the CASP-19 questionnaire: control, autonomy, pleasure and self-realisation. Fertility histories were derived using information on the births of children collected in all waves of the BHPS. The aspects of fertility history investigated were number of children born and parents' ages at birth of first and last child. Age, education, marital status, tenure status, smoking, co-residence with one or more children, perceived social support and health limitations were included as covariates. The results suggested that early entry to parenthood and to some extent high parity were related to poorer quality of life. These associations were mostly mediated by socio-economic, social support and health factors. Compared to women with two children, nulliparous women expressed a higher level of autonomy, and both nulliparous women and those with four or more children a higher level of self-realisation. Low parity was related to a lower level of pleasure, especially among men, but this relationship appeared weaker and among women was not significant when background factors were controlled.

In this paper, relationships between old age, retirement and social inequalities, as marked by participation in leisure activities, are examined. Two issues are tackled: first, whether old age and particularly the transition into retirement have an effect on participation in three selected activities; and second, whether the social inequalities underlying these activities change with older age and retirement. The empirical investigation uses data from the first two waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), which included variables on having a hobby, being a member of a club, and an index of participation in cultural events (cinema, theatre/opera/classical music performances, museums and galleries). The different socio-economic backgrounds of different age groups explain a considerable part of the observed age differences in these activities. Longitudinal analyses show that respondents tended to continue their activities regardless of changes in work and age, with two exceptions, namely that retirement was positively related to having a hobby, and those who stopped working because of an illness experienced a significant decline in all three of the examined categories of activity. The pattern of continuity also applied to socio-economic differences in patterns of participation in leisure activities. Some indications of slightly growing inequalities with age require further investigation.