This paper investigates the association between accumulated major lifecourse adversities and later-life depressive symptoms among older people in England, both at a single point in time (prevalence) and the onset over time during later life (incidence), using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Using retrospective data on the experience of major life adversities from childhood onwards, five latent classes were identified: no/few lifecourse adversities (58.6%), lost relationship (27.0%), chained adversities (2.4%), childhood adversities (6.3%) and war-related adversities (5.7%). Older people who had experienced ‘chained adversities’, ‘childhood adversities’ and ‘a lost relationship’ had higher odds of presenting current depressive symptoms in 2006, even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, health-risk behaviours and social resources. Longitudinal analysis indicated that amongst respondents who were clear of depression in 2006, those older people who had experienced childhood adversities, a lost relationship and war-related adversities experienced a higher risk of having a new case of depressive symptoms. Results further indicate that women's mental health in later life is more sensitive to earlier life adversities than men's. The study shows that intervention earlier in the lifecourse may have benefits for the individual both contemporaneously and over the longer term.

The ageing population of Turkey has brought later-life care into question. Family care remains most prevalent, but institutional, paid and professional care are increasing. Literature in Turkey has focused on the medical or social policy aspects but not care-givers’ experiences, nor how the care is performed. This study aims to illuminate care-givers’ experiences using qualitative methods, through in-depth interviews in Ankara with 19 care-givers providing home care for people aged 65 and over. Commonalities and differences were revealed among unpaid family care-givers, paid care-givers and professional care-givers. First, whether paid or unpaid, the bodily and emotional aspects of care work are intertwined. To cope with the ‘negativities’ involved in the work, nurses usually medicalised bodily tasks, unpaid care-givers cited traditional responsibilities and employed infantilisation, while paid care-givers mostly informalised the relationship, infantilised the person cared for and underlined their asexuality. Secondly, care work is gendered; silenced, invisible and ambivalent; related to intimacy with older bodies; and performed in the home space, which blurs the distinction between the private and public field for paid care. Finally, it involves emotional work regarding managing the bodily aspects and navigating the relationships surrounding the older person; and it is labour-intensive with an exploitative character.

Research investigating the association between women's work–family trajectories and their retirement intentions is limited. Studies considering how different institutional conditions affect this association are even more limited. To fill this gap, we use the first three waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, 2004–2009, and apply two-level random effects models with country-level fixed effects to a sample of mothers aged 50–64 years. Our dependent variable is the intention to retire as early as possible. We found that the following two different mechanisms are associated with mothers' early retirement intentions: (a) strategies to compensate for opportunity costs and (b) work attachment. When all other factors are equal, mothers with a work career characterised by interruptions and part-time work intend to work longer than other mothers, indicating the need to compensate for lower lifelong earnings at older ages. Some compensatory strategies are also observed among mothers who are classified as ‘never married’, ‘divorced’ or ‘widowed’, who wish to continue their careers. In other cases, evidence supporting work attachment mechanisms is found; for instance, working when the youngest child is younger than six years predicts the intention to delay retirement. These results change according to the welfare regime, underlining the importance of family policies and pension benefits to counterbalance the effect of opportunity costs on mothers' earnings.

Although retirement involves a radical change in daily activities, income, social roles and relationships, and the transition from paid work into retirement can, therefore, be expected to affect sleep, little is known about the effects of old-age retirement on changes in sleep disturbances, and how the impact of retirement may vary by gender, age and prior working conditions. This study modelled reported sleep disturbances up to nine years before to nine years following retirement in a sample of 2,110 participants from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH). Sleep disturbances over the retirement transition were modelled using repeated-measures regression analysis with Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) in relation to gender, age at retirement, working patterns (night work, full-time/part-time work), control over work hours, and psychological and physical working conditions. The analyses controlled for civil status, education level, income obtained from registers and self-rated health. Retiring from paid work was associated with decreased sleep disturbances. Greater reductions in sleep disturbances were reported by women, as well as by participants who retired before age 65 years, who were working full-time, who lacked control over their work hours and who had high psychological demands. These results, suggesting that old-age retirement from paid work is associated with reductions in disturbed sleep, pose a challenge for governments seeking to increase retirement ages.

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies addressing older people's political participation. Much of this literature, however, can be criticised for neglecting important aspects of seniors’ political participation, such as its dynamics across the lifecourse, its gendered nature and the influence of the particular socio-political contexts in which participation occurs. In this paper we bring together all these issues to explore the relation between lifecourse transitions and participation in political organisations in Spanish men and women. We conducted life-story interviews with 40 highly engaged older political activists regarding their lifetime story of political commitment, and identified eight different lifecourse transitions affecting their participation in political organisations. Three of these transitions were related to the work domain and five to the family domain. Most of them were clearly gender-dependent, affecting men's and women's engagement in political organisations in different ways and to different degrees. Our study expands on previous research on lifespan-related aspects of political participation by showing that considering biographical, gendered and historical aspects is key to understanding the relationships between life transitions and participation in political organisations across the lifecourse.

As the number of older immigrants in Europe rises, dementia within minority ethnic populations warrants attention as a significant public health problem. Equitable health and care services constitute a prioritised health policy aim on both supranational and national levels in Europe and is formulated in the Norwegian health legislation. Through interviews and focus groups with older immigrants, relatives of immigrants with dementia and health personnel, we explored the perceptions of dementia among ethnically diverse groups in Norway. The findings show that many interpret symptoms such as memory loss and disorientation as a natural part of ageing. Others consider dementia symptoms to have a psycho-social origin, deriving from social isolation. Some describe symptoms as an expression of a potentially transient sign of madness, while others point to destiny and God's will, representing basic and unalterable causes. However, another pattern of perception includes viewing dementia as a potentially transient physical illness, including a belief in a medical cure. By investigating how people with dementia and their families understand and manage the condition, one may facilitate access to relevant and adapted information. Furthermore, by exploring how people relate to their illness, health personnel may challenge explanatory models that create unrealistic expectations of cure, as well as models that, due to stigma or normalisation of symptoms, prevent the use of public care.

Respite services have traditionally been viewed as services for carers mainly. Perhaps as a result, the perspectives of people with dementia have been largely ignored. In this study, we consider these perspectives in relation to day and respite services, and contextualise them in light of Kitwood's prediction that person-centred care would be adopted only superficially by such services. Convenience sampling was employed and semi-structured interviews were conducted with six community-dwelling people with dementia. A thematic analysis was conducted and four themes were identified: ‘acceptability of service characteristics’, ‘meaningful engagement’, ‘personhood’ and ‘narrative citizenship’. The findings suggest that day services were more acceptable than residential respite, though some people would prefer home-based models, if available. ‘Meaningful’ engagement must be individually defined; however purposeful and reciprocal activity was commonly invoked as meaningful. ‘Personhood’ and ‘narrative citizenship’ were quintessential markers of quality care; while some people experienced personhood being bestowed upon them, others reported distinct instances of malignant social psychology, discrimination and stigma. In conclusion, an implementation gap may still persist regarding person-centred care in some respite services, based on the perspectives of people with dementia. Delivering the vision for care outlined here would require greater flexibility in service provision, more resources and more one-on-one staff–client time. The fundamental shift in thinking required by some staff relies on us supporting them to develop a greater self- and shared cultural-awareness around dementia.

An inclusive neighbourhood is a key facilitator enabling older adults to age in place. Neighbourhoods have been identified as a dimension of social exclusion important to older adults, and it has been argued that older adults are particularly vulnerable to neighbourhood change. The aim of this study was to explore older adults’ experiences of neighbourhood exclusion within the context of neighbourhood change. Focus groups were undertaken in the urban and rural areas of a metropolitan borough in England involving a total of 41 older adults, with data analysed via thematic analysis. Urban areas in the borough studied have transformed following the closure of the mining industry, with a high level of deprivation in many areas, while some rural areas have undergone gentrification. Within the context of structural neighbourhood change, four themes were identified: community cohesion, political agency, feelings of safety and the physical environment. The themes were interlinked, which calls for collaboration across traditional lines of professional responsibility, and for research that encompasses different aspects of neighbourhood exclusion. This study contributes with knowledge on older adults’ experiences of exclusion, including novel findings on the importance of political agency and collective memory, and identifies actions to combat exclusion. An active involvement of older adults in the development of initiatives to tackle social exclusion is recommended.

The radical demographic change produced by the ageing population in the Western world has entailed a complete transformation of its popular culture. The cinema is one of the popular arts to have been especially affected by the so-called ‘longevity revolution’. In fact, an important part of Hollywood celebrity culture and the mainstream film audiences belong to the same ageing demographic. The increasing necessity to tell and consume stories of ageing for the big screen is not only reflected in the growing number of films that feature older characters in their lead roles, but also in the changes produced in the cinematic narratives themselves. Film scholars within the inter-disciplinary field of cultural gerontology have started to address this phenomenon from various perspectives. Building on from their critical consideration, this article focuses on the particular case of Michael Radford's Elsa & Fred, a contemporary film released in 2014 that, paradoxically enough, helps renovate the youth-oriented genre of the romantic comedy through a ‘silvering’ romance. Taking into account contemporary manifestations of the romantic comedy genre, the essay proves that Radford's comedy contributes to the development of the ‘gerontocom’ as a new sub-genre in which old age is central to the protagonists’ characterisations and storylines. By considering the interaction of the generic rules of the genre with the hyper-visibility of the protagonists’ agedness, this article also shows the ways in which the film overcomes polarised views of ageing and enhances the figures’ own process of becoming in the last stage of their lives.

Relying on two unique data-sets on Chinese older immigrants (N = 3,157) and younger immigrants with ageing parents (N = 469) in Chicago, this study compared the level of filial expectation among the two groups and examined the predictors and mental health implications of having high filial expectation among each group. Results of t-tests, logistic regression and negative binominal analyses showed that, regardless of socio-demographic variables, acculturation, physical health and family relations, Chinese adult children had higher filial expectations on themselves than older immigrants’ filial expectation on the younger generation. Chinese older immigrants who had less education, lower levels of acculturation, poorer health and closer relationships with children reported higher filial expectation. In the cohort of younger immigrants, high filial expectation was associated with lower income, better health and closer relations with their parents. In addition, having high filial expectation was associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety among the older immigrants, but not among the younger cohort. The results indicated that, whereas Chinese older immigrants seemed to adapt their filial expectation in the new society, the younger cohort still strongly adhere to this traditional family norm. Maintaining strong filial expectation might be a protective factor for older immigrants’ mental health. Practice and policy implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.

This paper presents the experiences of formal carers working in technology-enriched supported accommodation for people living with dementia, examining their care-giving role from a person-centred care perspective. Within a qualitative study, 21 semi-structured interviews were conducted with formal carers and data were analysed following a thematic approach. Four main themes were identified that mapped to the attributes of the person-centred practice framework (PCPF): promoting choice and autonomy, staffing model, using assistive technology and feeling that ‘you're doing a good job’. Central to person-centred practice in these settings was the promotion of choice, autonomy and independence. The dichotomy between safety and independence was evident, curtailing the opportunities within the environmental enablers and associated embedded assistive technologies. Formal carers reported considerable job satisfaction working in these settings. The small-scale, home-like facilities seemed to have a positive effect on job satisfaction. These findings are relevant to policy makers, commissioners and service providers, highlighting the facilitators of person-centred care in community dwellings for people living with dementia and the role of formal carers in promoting this approach.