Media coverage of dementia can influence public and professional attitudes towards the syndrome, shaping societal knowledge of dementia and impacting how people with dementia are cared for. This paper reports on a study of news articles about dementia published in the British press in the years 2012–2017. The analysis combines the tools of corpus linguistics, a methodology for quantitatively surveying a vast amount of electronic linguistic data, with the qualitative perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis, which seeks to uncover dominant discourses and ideologies. The most salient discourse that emerged from this analysis was the portrayal of dementia in biomedical terms, with a particular focus on the pathological processes of dementia, and pharmaceutical treatments and research. Keywords relating to this discourse are interrogated in detail, illuminating the linguistic strategies through which the pathology of dementia and people with dementia are depicted. This study highlights the challenges that this type of reporting presents to people living with dementia and their families, and points to the relevance of a discursive approach to understanding societal perceptions of dementia.

Older employees face a severe employability problem, partly because of dominant stereotypes about them. This study investigates stereotypes of older employees in corporate and news media. Drawing on the Stereotype Content Model, we content analysed newspaper coverage and corporate media of 50 large-scale Dutch organisations, published between 2006 and 2013. The data revealed that stereotypical portrayals of older employees are more common in news media than in corporate media and mixed in terms of valence. Specifically, older employees were positively portrayed with regard to warmth stereotypes, such as trustworthiness, but negatively with regard to competence stereotypes, such as technological competence and adaptability. Additionally, stereotypical portrayals that do not clearly belong to warmth or competence dimensions are found, such as the mentoring role stereotype and the costly stereotype. Because competence stereotypes weigh more heavily in employers’ productivity perceptions, these media portrayals might contribute to the employability problem of older employees. We suggest that older employees could benefit from a more realistic media debate about their skills and capacities.

Extra care housing aims to meet the housing, care and support needs of older people, while helping them to maintain their independence in their own private accommodation. In 2003, the Department of Health announced capital funding to support the development of extra care housing, and made the receipt of funding conditional on participating in an evaluative study. Drawing on information collected directly from residents in 19 schemes, this paper presents findings on the factors motivating older people to move to extra care housing, their expectations of living in this new environment, and whether these differ for residents moving to the smaller schemes or larger retirement villages. In total, 949 people responded, 456 who had moved into the smaller schemes and 493 into the villages. Of the residents who moved into the villages most (75%) had not received a care assessment prior to moving in, and had no identified care need. There was evidence that residents with care needs were influenced as much by some of the attractions of their new living environment as those without care needs who moved to the retirement villages. The most important attractions of extra care housing for the vast majority of residents were: tenancy rights, flexible onsite care and support, security offered by the scheme and accessible living arrangements. The results suggest that, overall, residents with care needs seem to move proactively when independent living was proving difficult rather than when staying put is no longer an option. A resident's level of dependency did not necessarily influence the importance attached to various push and/or pull factors. This is a more positive portrayal of residents’ reasons for moving to smaller schemes than in previous UK literature, although moves did also relate to residents’ increasing health and mobility problems. In comparison, type of tenure and availability of social/leisure facilities were more often identified as important by those without care needs in the villages. Therefore, as in other literature, the moves of village residents without care needs seemed to be planned ones mostly towards facilities and in anticipation of the need for care services in the future.

The degree of social support available to older persons who are institutionalised is under-researched. This study investigated the structural and functional support exchanges with their social network members of 72 nursing home residents in Hong Kong (58 women, 14 men). They were asked to identify their network members, to evaluate the degree to which each one was important in their lives, and to rate the support received from and provided to each individual. The participants reported few network members (average 2.6) and in many cases neither a spouse nor children were included. Only one-fifth of the participants reported a social network member in the nursing home, and most of those who did nominated a member of the staff. There were also few friends in their networks. On the whole, the participants were comparatively socially isolated. The findings were explained in terms of the shame associated by the Chinese with placement in an institutional home, cultural patterns of social support, changes in children's filial attitudes, home placement policies, and the management practices that accentuate the distance between the older person and family members around the time of institutionalisation. These inculcate a feeling of abandonment, and discourage family visits as well as social interactions within the home.

This paper explores the housing wealth of older people in Britain in relation to their incomes and financial wealth. Family Expenditure Survey data for 1992/3 to 1993/4 are used to assess the extent to which housing wealth could alleviate income poverty in old age. A range of poverty and housing wealth thresholds are used. Although housing wealth increases with both income and financial wealth, the analysis suggests that there are non-negligible proportions of low income older people who could generate small supplements to their incomes by converting the wealth tied up in their homes into an income stream, but in few cases would this be sufficient to pay for long-term residential care for any length of time.

Britain's minority ethnic groups are numerous and diverse, and among them there are complex relationships between their origins, the timing of their arrival by decade and the age of the migrants, their geographical distribution in Britain, and gender differences in their occupational status distributions. All of these lifecourse attributes have implications for the migrants' situations as they reach old age. To advance our knowledge and understanding of these factors, this paper examines the lifecourse of a sample of 303 South Asian older migrants living in Birmingham, England's second largest city. The sample included 103 Gujaratis, 100 Punjabis, and 100 Sylhetis. The paper examines their living arrangements, education and language abilities, occupational status, and settlement and moves within the United Kingdom. The associations between ethnic group membership, gender and pre-migration histories are related to differences in their settlement patterns and residential mobility in Britain. The findings show variations in the timing, chronology and locations of each ethnic group's major lifecourse events, in the meanings associated with the events, and in the outcomes in late life. The similarities and differences between the ethnic groups and between men and women are discussed with regard to the current socio-economic situation of ethnic older people in the UK and the prospect for continuing inequalities.

Given increases in childlessness, we ask if and how the permanently childless substitute for adult children in their later-life support networks. Previous research finds that they are disadvantaged on several network and support indicators. Yet, the role of different substitution mechanisms remains unclear. We examine two substitution mechanisms: substitution through adjustments of network size/composition and through higher efficiency of personal ties. Data are from the German Ageing Survey (childless: N = 1,886; parents without/with residentially proximate children: N = 4,437/8,337). Our descriptive and regression results on network size/composition and the number of potential informational and emotional supporters show that both mechanisms play a role: the childless have more friends and extended kin, and they are more likely to consider them as potential supporters, than parents. Across cohorts or age groups, the relative effect size of network size/composition versus tie efficiency changes. Parents with no children nearby constitute a mixed type that shows similarities to the childless on some indicators of social support and to parents with at least one child nearby on other indicators. Our findings provide a foundation for better predicting how current demographic trends affect future scenarios of social support in later life and for identifying the future need for formal care services. Thus, they are relevant for social scientists and policy makers alike.

Using a qualitative approach, this article examines how the experiences of emotional loneliness are embedded in the everyday lives and relationships of older adults. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted in 2010 with older people who reported feeling lonely, often or all the time, during a cohort study in southern Finland. The research reveals the multifaceted nature of loneliness and its causes. Behind emotional loneliness, we identified lost and unfulfilled relationships, involving the loss or lack of a partner, the absence of a meaningful friendship, complex parenthood and troubling childhood experiences. Most of the interviewees have faced loneliness that only began in old age, but for some, loneliness has been present for nearly a lifetime.

The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of abuse among the residents of long-term care facilities in Israel, and its associations with risk indicators. Seventy-one such residents aged 70 or more years were assessed in the internal and orthopaedic departments of two university medical centres for possible abuse by carers at the long-term facilities from which they were admitted. The study collected socio-demographic and health profiles and a list of maltreatment or abusive acts, and administered the Signs of Abuse Inventory and the Expanded Indicators of Abuse Questionnaire. Among the 71 residents, 31 per cent reported some form of maltreatment, most being instances of disrespectful behaviour. Signs of abuse, mostly of neglect, were detected in 22.5 per cent of the sample. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that higher scores on risk indicators and higher dependence on others for the activities of daily living significantly associated with reported abuse, while age, gender, risk indicators and lower blood albumin level (being an indicator of worse nutritional and health status) significantly associated with identified signs of abuse. It is concluded that direct questioning mainly discloses instances of disrespectful behaviours and humiliation, while the assessment of signs of abuse is more sensitive to cases of neglect. Risk indicators were found to be reliable indicators of abuse. Routine screening for these indicators is recommended to improve detection and thereby to prevent abuse in long-term care facilities.

In the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006, the United Kingdom government set a ‘default’ retirement age of 65 years after which an employer can compulsorily retire workers, and made it obligatory for employers to consider the ‘business case’ for any employees' requests to continue in work after the default age. This is a ‘light touch’ approach to reducing age discrimination at the workplace and to changing the established ‘culture of retirement’. While encouraging productive staff to remain in post beyond 65 years of age, it leaves implementation of the policies and achievement of their goals to the discretion of employers. This article explores how British employers are adapting to the law, by drawing from interviews with 70 managers from a wide range of organisations. Overall the collected evidence shows the limits of a business case approach as a means of changing employers' practices. It was found that line managers, rather than senior managers or human resources specialists, generally decide which employees can stay employed after age 65 years. Consequently, the research suggests that opportunities for workers aged 65 or more years to stay employed are more the result of individual arrangements with their immediate managers than changes in an organisation's policies and practices. Altogether, the evidence suggests that consolidation rather than eradication of the established retirement culture has occurred.

Community physical activity (PA) groups have come in to being worldwide to inspire older adults to engage in PA. However, there is limited evidence that older adults adhere to these groups, particularly those of a lower socio-economic status, with health conditions, from black and minority ethnic (BME) groups and men. This study aimed to explore experiences of attending PA groups from the viewpoint of community-living older adults, including those sub-groups of the population highlighted above. The purpose was to gain an understanding of what would influence long-term adherence to community PA groups. Eighteen participants aged 65 and above took part in three focus groups carried out in North West England. Thematic network analysis was used for theme generation and interpretation. Low-cost, universal locations are essential to enable older adults to engage regularly in PA, however, it is the social space that is created within these physical settings that is most influential in fostering their long-term adherence. Facilitating cross-cultural relationships and supporting older adults to have more control in shaping the PA environment will ensure that these settings are more conducive to the long-term adherence of diverse groups of older adults.

In Britain, older people have lower average incomes and a higher risk of income poverty than the general population. Older pensioners are more likely to be in poverty than younger ones. Yet certain indicators of their living standards suggest that older people experience less hardship than expected, given their incomes. A possible explanation is that older people convert income into basic living standards at a higher rate than younger people, implying that as people age they need less income to achieve a given standard of living. Much existing evidence has been based on cross-sectional data and therefore may not be a good guide to the consequences of ageing. We use longitudinal data on people aged at least 50 years from the British Household Panel Survey to investigate the effects of ageing on the relationship between standard of living, as measured by various deprivation indices, and income. We find that for most indices, ageing increases deprivation when controlling for income and other factors. The exception is a subjective index of ‘financial strain’, which appears to fall as people age. We also find evidence of cohort effects. At any given age and income, more-recently-born older people in general experience more deprivation than those born longer ago. To some extent these ageing and cohort effects balance out, which suggests that pensions do not need to change with age.

In this paper we tell of our critical review of reablement – an emerging global practice model in community- and home-based care for older people. Whereas the reablement approach is gaining global acceptance, there are questions and concerns among researchers and policy makers about what reablement means and how it is used in practice. We examined the literature on reablement between 2005 and 2017 using clearly defined inclusion criteria. We focused on identifying within authors’ accounts its essential features and how it is practised. In our examination of conceptualisation, we found nine essential features of reablement, the most predominant being the wish to improve the functionality of clients so they can continue to live in their own homes. Of course, we found variability in policy and geographic contexts, but we were not perturbed by this. Rather, we found the under-representation of social connectivity for clients to be regrettable. We constructed a typology of four theoretical types of reablement to help us reflect on the current state of research and practice, and we tentatively offer this for the consideration of the research, practice and policy communities.

As yet the determinants of the need for nursing homes and old age homes are not clearly understood. This may be due to the fact that care facilities providing different levels of care may yield different predictors of use. Moreover, the absence of theory and ignorance of the problems with ‘use‘ as the dependent variable, may be responsible for this. In this study these issues are addressed explicitly. The study focuses on the need for living in an old age home and a theoretical model predicts under what circumstances frail elderly people will express the need for living in such a home. Findings show that, as hypothesised, loss of comfort and affection are among the main predictors of a strong orientation towards living in an old age home. Resources to counter the loss of comfort and affection – a spouse, income, home adaptations, private help, informal and formal home care – were only partly effective in their hypothesised function of deterring orientation towards living in an old age home. Pressure from others to apply for an old age home had the strongest effect. The findings are discussed and some implications for policy are considered.

Uganda's population is ageing, which comes with increased and varied burdens of disease and health-care needs. At the same time, gerontological care in Uganda remains neglected. This paper examines the factors that cause older Ugandans to delay health-care access. We conduct a thematic analysis of data drawn from nine focus groups held with rural Ugandans aged 60-plus. Our analysis highlights the factors that delay older persons’ access to health care and how these align with the Three-Delay Model, which was originally developed to assess and improve obstetric care in low-resource settings. Our participants report delays in deciding to seek care related to mobility and financial limitations, disease aetiology, severity and stigma (Delay I); reaching care because of poor roads and limited transportation options (Delay II); and receiving appropriate care because of ageism among health-care workers, and poorly staffed and under-supplied facilities (Delay III). We find these delays to care are interrelated and impacted by factors at the individual, community and health-system levels. We conclude by arguing for multi-pronged interventions that will address these delays, improve access to care and ultimately enhance older Ugandans’ health and wellbeing.

After noting the centrality of local authority homes for older people in British research on institutionalisation, influential research undertaken in this setting during the 19803 is reviewed. Three problems are identified in this current of research. Firstly, the assumption that there is a uniform process of institutionalisation is questioned. Secondly, the lack of comparative studies is highlighted. Thirdly, the absence of the structured dependency thesis is regarded as indicative of the lack of attention paid to social divisions. In conclusion, it is suggested that the concept of institutionalisation may have outlived its usefulness and that an alternative approach needs to be developed which is capable of focusing on the degree of dependency, independence and interdependence existing in a range of care settings.

This article reviews some of the literature on caregiving from social policy and on professionalisation from sociology. The context of the article is the care of dementia sufferers with particular reference to the role of family and other informal caregivers. The theoretical contributions on informal and formal caregiving have been dominated by the gender order and the professional order to the detriment of other aspects of structure. In the light of these theoretical contributions the article explores the inherent contradiction in society's desire to provide care to dementia sufferers without compromising the position of informal and formal caregivers.

Studies in environmental gerontology have progressed our understanding of the ways in which older people respond to and manage the environments in which they live, including their decisions about relocation and the influencing factors. Much of this work, however, has been done with relatively healthy and mobile older people living in domestic environments. It is often the case that when care-home residents move, the decisions are taken by others while the residents are passive and maybe hardly consulted. Far from the residents' preferences and initiatives being instrumental, they are moved by imposition. In the United Kingdom, the setting of this study, such imposed moves are common, partly because registration regulations restrict the range of care that a home can provide, and make some moves unavoidable. A questionnaire was distributed to care homes in two English local authorities to determine the incidence of relocation, and 10 homes were approached to take part in further studies, which included case-note audits, and interviews with staff and 12 older people who had relocated. The study found that the pattern of moves was complex, and that some residents were active in deciding to relocate and in the selection of the relocation home. The study concludes, however, that for residents to have an active role, they must be given support both to access the information required for decision-making and to implement their decisions.

Widowhood becomes increasingly common with advancing age, and spousal bereavement is likely to present additional challenges for adults in very late life. However, previous studies have not considered the potential heterogeneity of the experience of widowhood for different age cohorts. This study provided a novel examination of the experience of social resources during widowhood in the fourth age. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 widowed older men and women in the fourth age, i.e. aged 85 years and older. Participants were asked about their access to, and mobilisation of, social resources during widowhood in the fourth age. The role that these resources play in adjustment to spousal loss was also explored. During this phase, widowhood was associated with diminished social networks and concurrent challenges related to ageing and health which impacted upon support needs and social participation. Despite requiring and receiving increasing levels of social support, participants strove to maximise independence. Males and those widowed during the fourth age were more likely to experience social isolation, loneliness and unwanted informal support. Through the mobilisation of social resources many oldest-old widowed adults continue to lead socially engaged and meaningful lives. The implications of the findings for future policy and practice are discussed, including the need for programmes to promote the continuing independence, self-directedness and social engagement of widowed individuals experiencing advanced ageing.

The trajectory of modern China, namely from dire poverty and communist fever to economic boom and marketisation under an authoritarian regime, makes the country a unique social laboratory for examining how social environment affects human development of individuals. This study investigated the correlation between childhood adversity and depressive symptoms of Chinese middle-aged and older adults, as well as how urbanisation moderates the correlation. A sub-sample (N = 14,681) of the baseline of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study was analysed. Seven variables were used in the latent class analysis to establish a childhood adversity typology. Three urbanisation statuses were identified according to the Hukou (household registration system) status and neighbourhood type: non-urbanised, semi-urbanised and fully urbanised. The correlation between childhood adversity and depressive symptoms and the moderation of urbanization on the correlation were assessed with factorial analysis of covariance. Three latent classes for childhood adversities were identified: ‘normal childhood class', ‘low childhood socio-economic status and health class' and ‘traumatic childhood class'. The class membership was significantly correlated with depressive symptoms (p = 0.015), and the urbanisation status, also significantly affecting depressive symptoms (p = 0.05), had significant moderating effect on the correlation (p = 0.002). It is suggested that more social inclusive policies need to be adopted in order to guarantee the equal distribution of wellbeing led by urbanisation.