This paper emanates from a small-scale qualitative study, currently in progress, looking at the implications for older people of decisions made by a social services department that they are ineligible for service provision. While the operation of eligibility criteria in the UK has been shown to exclude an increasing number of prospective users from receiving a service, little is known about how those refused a service contend with their difficulties or the implications these strategies have for them. The paper focuses on themes that have emerged during the first phases of the study in relation to how older people endeavour to manage their ‘unmet need’. It is suggested that a key integrative theme concerns their efforts to maintain a positive sense of self indicating, it is argued, the need for processes involved in the seeking, receiving and giving of help to be managed in a way that sustains the sense of self of the older person.

The philosophy concerning long-term care for frail seniors has shifted from a provider-driven, medical model toward a more client-centred, social model. While this philosophy emphasises the decision-making abilities of clients and respect for their values and preferences, evidence suggests that there are difficulties in understanding and implementing the philosophy. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with residents of adult family living and assisted living programmes in western Canada to better understand the elements that residents themselves felt were integral to client-centred care.

Three main themes emerged from the data analysis: (1) the physical setting, people within the setting, and the community were important areas of expression of residents' values and preferences; (2) the decision about where to live influenced whether the residential care environment was congruent with residents' values and preferences; (3) contentment resulted when there was a good fit between preferences and experiences, reflecting the essence of residents' perspective of client-centred care. Choices among models of care, appropriate staffing levels and training, and recognition of family contributions may improve the practice of client-centred care.

Little sociological attention has been paid to the repartnering of older people after widowhood, and how age, gender and the meanings of marriage influence choices about new cross-gender relationships. This paper reports on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 widows and 26 widowers over the age of 65, widowed for at least two years and who had not remarried. Respondents were asked about their current lifestyle and relationships and whether they had ever considered remarriage. The words ‘selfish’ and ‘freedom’ were often used by the widows when describing their present existence, which was associated with not having to look after someone all the time. Few of the widowers mentioned selfishness and this was more likely to be associated with feelings of anger at the loss of their spouse; none of the men associated widowhood with a sense of freedom. The paper argues that the desire for repartnering after widowhood is gender-specific: widows are more likely to choose to remain without a partner for intrinsic factors: the reluctance to relinquish a new-found freedom; while for widowers, extrinsic factors of older age and poor health are more salient issues in new partnership formation choices and constraints.

Nursing homes as care institutions seek to offer a home where people can live until their death. A potential conflict, therefore, exists as nursing homes are both a place where life is lived and where death is regularly encountered. It has been proposed that within residential care homes for older people, dying individuals are separated from living people. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in four English nursing homes the management of the dying process and the relationship between life and death is explored. There is much uncertainty inherent in the boundary between life and death for many residents in nursing homes. The relationship between life and death for these residents is less about the sequestration of dying people from living people, but rather the creation of transitional states between these two polarities.

Gerontological inquiries into understandings of successful ageing have been culture-specific. This means that they have only been studied in the specific cultural settings that have given them their meaning. Understandings of successful ageing that are simultaneously influenced by two cultures have yet to be studied. This study is based on a newly-designed culturally-relevant theoretical framework for the study of successful ageing, and focuses on the context of migration where culture of origin and host culture meet. Interviews based on vignettes have been conducted with 30 Iranian immigrants in Sweden in order to reveal if, and how, the pre- and post-migration understandings of successful ageing differ. The findings show that cultural contexts determine how the construct in question is understood and that migration between different cultures can challenge these understandings.