Education may have an important role to play in helping to enhance older people's quality of life. The University of the Third Age (U3A) has operated successfully in many countries for nearly two decades, yet few studies have described the characteristics of those who are attracted to the movement, or the benefits to the individual and, possibly, to wider society of the U3A approach to education. This study discusses major findings from 770 responses to a postal survey involving members from twelve independent U3A campuses in three Australian States, and compares these findings with data reported for older learners in other countries. Some implications for Australian U3As undertaking research activities which have the potential to benefit the wider ageing community are raised.

Little is known about the income dynamics of retirement in Britain, in part because of a lack of data. The information is of some topical interest given the growing number of older people, the trend towards earlier retirement, the decline in the value of the basic state pension, the growing reliance on occupational and private pensions, and continuing relatively high poverty rates among people in old age. This paper considers the important question of income and retirement and, in particular, the association between transitions into retirement and the probability of becoming poor. It is based on longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey waves 1–9, covering 1991–1999. We also relate differences in poverty entry probabilities among the retired to differences in factors such as a retiree's health, housing tenure, age and sex, education, labour market status and history, household composition and spouse's characteristics.

This article aims to answer the following question: how have refugee families in the United States (US) modified attitudes and behaviours surrounding intergenerational exchanges within the context of filial piety? This research reports on one 31-member extended family in a community of Cambodian refugee families living along the Gulf of Mexico coast. The family members in this study have changed types, found new meanings in, and are often ambivalent about, intergenerational exchanges. Moreover, they have held onto those aspects of Cambodian culture that were considered essential, such as filial piety and elder reverence, while adapting and redefining types and meanings of intergenerational exchanges the better to reflect their current lives in the United States. These findings illuminate ways in which changed life circumstances and cultural transitions shaped attitudes, preferences and behavioural patterns associated with intergenerational exchanges. The findings also show how and why refugee families have negotiated and modified their beliefs and behaviours surrounding intergenerational exchanges in the context of massive social and cultural disruption.

There has recently emerged in the writings of those who have adopted an overtly ‘radical’ approach to social work and the welfare state, a coherent interpretation of how the status of older persons is lowered in the course of the development of industrial capitalism. The focus in these recent writings is on the social creation of dependent status and the structural determinants of the competitive relationship between elderly individuals and younger adults in the labour market. This paper reviews the arguments of this school of thought arguing firstly that it fails to take sufficient account of the longer term population history of England, suggesting that the contrast between the middle and later twentieth century and the nineteenth century is apparently so marked largely because of the atypicality of the latter period when high fertility and rapid demographic growth produced an historical minimum for the proportion of the elderly in the total population. A second failure in this recent radical or marxist research is that it also does not take sufficient account of the kinship system in north west Europe which appears to have created a situation of structured dependency of the elderly on the collectivity irrespective of the specific mode of production. Pre-industrial north west Europeans exhibited a striking contrast in this particular cultural trait with many, indeed most non-industrial societies outside Western Europe or regions populated by emmigrants from that area.

Over the last few decades, increasing attention has been paid to the issue of wellbeing among older people, and life satisfaction has been used as an indicator to evaluate older people's life conditions. This paper sheds some light on this topic with reference to Italy, a country characterised by an increasing ageing population. The aim is to examine life satisfaction among people aged 65 and older and its predictors. We adopt a gender approach to examine whether – as suggested by the literature – older men and women have different sources of satisfaction. We test this hypothesis in Italy, a country still characterised by an unbalanced public and private gender system. In doing this, we also control whether living arrangements – specifically living alone – influence the determinants of life satisfaction of older men and women. The data used are from the cross-sectional surveys ‘Aspects of Daily Life’, undertaken in Italy by the National Statistical Institute. The results do not show clear gender differences in the determinants of life satisfaction, with only some slight gender differences among those living alone. This suggests that the social and cultural environment may play a relevant role for older people's life satisfaction.

Managing the assets of older people is a common and potentially complex task of informal care with legal, financial, cultural, political and family dimensions. Older people are increasingly recognised as having significant assets, but the family, the state, service providers and the market have competing interests in their use. Increased policy interest in self-provision and user-charges for services underline the importance of asset management in protecting the current and future health, care and accommodation choices of older people. Although ‘minding the money’ has generally been included as an informal care-giving task, there is limited recognition of either its growing importance and complexity or of care-givers' involvement. The focus of both policy and practice have been primarily on substitute decision-making and abuse. This paper reports an Australian national survey and semi-structured interviews that have explored the prevalence of non-professional involvement in asset management. The findings reveal the nature and extent of involvement, the tasks that informal carers take on, the management processes that they use, and that ‘minding the money’ is a common informal care task and mostly undertaken in the private sphere using some risky practices. Assisting informal care-givers with asset management and protecting older people from financial risks and abuse require various strategic policy and practice responses that extend beyond substitute decision-making legislation. Policies and programmes are required: to increase the awareness of the tasks, tensions and practices surrounding asset management; to improve the financial literacy of older people, their informal care-givers and service providers; to ensure access to information, advice and support services; and to develop better accountability practices.

Digital storytelling provides older adults with an opportunity to become digital producers, connect with others through story and explore their life history. The authors report on the results of a digital storytelling project for older adults. The study investigated the experiences and perceived benefits of older adults who created digital stories during a ten-week course and explored the reactions of story viewers to the digital stories they viewed during a special sharing event. Eighty-eight older adult participants in Metro Vancouver who attended one of 13 courses offered were included in the study. Most of the participants were female and over half were immigrants. Results from the focus group interviews demonstrated a rich array of reported social and emotional benefits experienced through the process of creating a digital story within the course. Three main themes emerged: social connectedness through shared experience and story, reminiscence and reflecting on life, and creating a legacy. Viewers who attended a ‘Sharing Our Stories’ event reported that the stories were meaningful, well constructed and invoked a range of emotions. The researchers conclude that digital storytelling may help digital storytellers increase connectedness to others and to self. Additionally, this connectedness may extend over time through the process of examining the past to create a digital story that can serve as a legacy to connect to future generations.

Despite international growth in policies to increase the identification and response to elder abuse and neglect, there remain considerable barriers to treating the problem. Some of these barriers may be attributed to how older adults from different racial/ethnic backgrounds define, experience and seek to remedy elder mistreatment. Using focus group discussions based on case vignettes, this paper examines how older adults from different racial and ethnic backgrounds in the United States of America perceive elder mistreatment. Five focus groups were conducted with African Americans, English-speaking Latinos, Spanish-speaking Latinos, non-Latino Whites and African American care-givers for older adults. While similar definitions and meanings of elder abuse were expressed across the different racial/ethnic groups, Latino participants introduced additional themes of machismo, respect, love and early intervention to stop abuse, suggesting that perceptions/beliefs about elder mistreatment are determined by culture and degree of acculturation in addition to race/ethnicity. Most differences in attitudes occurred within groups, demonstrating that perceptions vary by individual as well as by culture. In identifying scenarios that constitute elder mistreatment, some participants felt that certain cases of abuse are actually the persistence of intimate partner violence into old age. Participants also indicated that victims may prefer to tolerate mistreatment in exchange for other perceived benefits (e.g. companionship, security); and out of fear that they could be placed in an institution if mistreatment is reported. Findings suggest the need for person-centred intervention and prevention models that integrate the cultural background, care needs and individual preferences of older adults.

This article addresses the issue of the loss of identity a woman experiences when she becomes a widow. Based on an analysis of published autobiographical accounts of widowhood, it looks at how women express their experience of losing their husbands. It explicates a process of ‘identity foreclosure’ which strips a woman of her identity at every level, and the process by which the authors of these accounts have built new identities. Extensive quoting from the published accounts reveals the richness of these data and provides a feeling for the emotional impact of widowhood that women experience.

The population of South Korea is ageing rapidly and government provision for older people is meagre. Hence the erosion of traditional family support for older people is of much concern. Yet relatively little is known about the actual financial status of elderly Koreans or the amount of economic support they receive from children. This paper addresses these issues using data from the 2006 Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing. We find that almost 70 per cent of Koreans aged 65 or more years received financial transfers from children and that the transfers accounted for about a quarter of an average elder's income. While over 60 per cent of elders would be poor without private transfers, children's transfers substantially mitigate elder poverty, filling about one-quarter of the poverty gap. Furthermore, children's transfers tend to be proportionally larger to low-income parents, so elder income inequality is reduced by the transfers. Over 40 per cent of elders lived with a child and co-residence helps reduce elder poverty. By showing that Korean children still play a crucial role in providing financial old-age security, we demonstrate how important it is for the Korean government to design old-age policies that preserve the incentives for private assistance. This snapshot of today's Korea also has implications for other rapidly changing Asian countries that are following a similar trajectory.

This study explores whether the plans of older workers on the cusp of retirement are in line with the active ageing agenda set by policy makers in Europe. The study was carried out in Italy, England, and the United States of America (USA). A total of 133 older workers who planned to retire within the next 10–12 months were interviewed (55 in England, 40 in Italy and 38 in the USA) between May 2014 and early 2015 using common semi-structured questions. Active Ageing Index dimensions were used to gauge the orientation of older people towards their retirement. The results of the study suggest that, with some differences, retirement plans of interviewees were substantially consistent with the active ageing perspective. However, some challenges were highlighted, including the need for governments to do more to promote genuine freedom of choice in relation to leaving the labour market, and to provide greater support for informal family carers. Findings also pointed to the need to measure active ageing in connection with individual wellbeing, e.g. by including indicators of leisure activities and by considering the re-weighting of employment and informal care dimensions. Companies could also provide more support during the retirement transition, with opportunities for maintained social connection with former colleagues, and help in making and fulfilling retirement plans.

Introducing the special issue, this paper provides a state-of-the-art on established and new trends in the study of international retirement migration (IRM) and summarises the five papers that follow. Early studies on IRM were mainly within Europe and drew on the conceptual framework of lifestyle migration, with some reference to the transnational and mobilities paradigms. New frontiers in IRM are presented under three heads. Firstly, new geographical frontiers extend IRM to new destinations within and proximate to Europe, and to new locations in the global South such as Thailand and Ecuador. Secondly, new typological frontiers involve a broadening of the class and wealth backgrounds of the retirees, including the ‘return of retirement’ of labour migrants to their countries of origin, and attentiveness to IRM's gendered aspects. Thirdly, new conceptual and theoretical frontiers of IRM involve a more in-depth investigation of its transnational aspects, exploration of the various regimes of mobility and, most importantly, a political economy perspective which stresses global inequalities and histories of colonialism in shaping access to privileged lifestyles. In the final part of the paper, the original features of each paper in the special issue are highlighted, demonstrating how they are collectively integrated and contribute to the advancement of IRM research.

The concept of wisdom, popularly associated with the idea of old age, was neglected during the 20th century. It has recently revived as a matter of academic concern, but remains imperfectly understood. This article therefore begins to explore both the concept of wisdom and some forms we might expect wise behaviour to take. It emphasises the contemporary relevance of historical approaches through an examination of Hebrew and Greek writing on wisdom. Recent contributions from psychology develop aspects of these traditions; but studying wisdom ethnographically also substantially expands our understanding of what wisdom is. An ethnographic interview from Austria exemplifies social as well as psychological aspects of wisdom, showing that part of the meaning of wisdom resides in its effects on a social setting. Aspects of discourse in rural Ireland, when interpreted in the light of maxim-related wisdom traditions, extend this claim, showing more about how wise interventions activate wisdom in the society surrounding them. Other ethnographic cases also develop this notion of wisdom as based on social interaction, by exploring its effects. If we face the methodological challenges entailed in tracing wisdom ethnographically, we enhance our understanding of the concept itself and stress the fruitfulness of the idea of wisdom as an attainment of the lifecourse.

Many questions and contradictions pervade both the understanding of what has come to be known as ‘elder abuse and neglect’ and attempts to address it. Four major competing constructions reflecting four differing needs discourses can be discerned in legislation, programmes and services, and in the actions of individuals. In this paper these constructions are introduced, examined and situated, with reference to the social and historical antecedents that have contributed to the emergence of elder abuse and neglect as a social problem. The article considers how these constructions are manifest in public and private responses to elder abuse and neglect, through discussion of the Canadian experience of service delivery to older people in situations of mistreatment and neglect, in non-institutional settings. It is concluded that deeply embedded value conflicts in Canadian society and in its political economy, compound the problem of resolving issues of mistreatment through public policy.

This study examines the retirement income of women in Europe, focusing on the effect of motherhood. Due to their more interrupted working careers compared to non-mothers and fathers, mothers are likely to accumulate fewer pension entitlements, and consequently, to receive lower incomes in later life. However, pension systems in Europe vary widely in the degree to which they compensate for care-related career interruptions by means of redistributive elements or pension care entitlements. Therefore, care interruptions may matter for the retirement income of women in some countries, but may be rather irrelevant in others. On the basis of life history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARELIFE) for women aged between 60 and 75 years in 13 European countries, the interplay of individual lifecourse characteristics with institutional and structural factors is examined. The results show that the lower retirement income of mothers is mainly a result of fewer years in employment and lower-status jobs throughout the lifecourse. The analysis of institutional factors reveals that pension care entitlements are not able to provide a compensation for care-related cutbacks in working life. A generally redistributive design of the pension system including basic or targeted pension schemes, in contrast, appears as an effective measure to balance differences in employment participation over the lifecourse.

The nursing home has become a paramount site for the care and custody of old people, but it also affects how we think and talk about the ageing body. In this article, narrative and ethnographic material drawn from a variety of care-related settings is used to illustrate how and where the nursing home serves as a discursive anchor for embodiment. Circumstantial, local cultural, and organisational mediations are considered, featuring institutionalisation to be as much a descriptive phenomenon, as it is a residential relocation.

Difficulty in adjusting to retirement has consistently emerged as a problem for approximately a third of retirees. A body of research has converged on a description of the poor adjuster as one in poor health, with inadequate income, a negative pre-retirement attitude, but with an increased likelihood of adaptation over time. Findings relating to other factors such as socio-economic status, occupation, activity, career fulfilment, job satisfaction and work commitment are far less conclusive, with interpretation hampered by a failure to control for the more well established correlates of retirement adjustment. This paper reviews the empirical work in this field, evaluates the goal hierarchy model and the political economy of old age literature as bases for explaining differences in retirement adjustment, and proposes a theoretical framework for future research which brings these two perspectives together.

This paper discusses the politics of ageing in the US within a political economy framework. Four forces are shaping US policy: austerity, federalism, deregulation, and the medical-industrial complex. Two major trends in the development of policy are the commodification of the aged and their needs and a class basis for the distribution of benefits, differentiating the deserving elderly from the undeserving elderly. Ideologies of individualism, self-help, privatisation, and procompetition are being used to delegitimate public programmes and to reduce expectations about what government can and should do to ameliorate social problems.

Recent policy is characterised not only by a reduction of federal funds for domestic social spending, but also a restructuring of the community care delivery system as it operates in the private, non-profit sector of the economy. The emergent processes of this restructuring, e.g., targeting of services based on ability to pay and individual characteristics, medicalisation, and absorption of non-profit agencies by for-profits are discussed. These policies and the consequences that flow from them are viewed in light of the search for new sources of capital investment in the domestic markets. This analysis raises important political questions concerning the transformation of relations between the state and the non-profit sector.

A cohort study was carried out in 1990 in Jyväskylä, central Finland among 80-year-old residents as part of the Evergreen project. A total of 262 people born in 1910 were interviewed. In addition to epidemiological data, tape-recorded narrative stories focusing on the ageing experience were collected from a subsample of 20 people (10 men and 10 women). A five-year follow-up was carried out with the same cohort in 1995. Out of the 20 people in the original subsample, 17 (8 women and 9 men) were still alive to describe their ageing experience at 85. The analysis proceeded along the hermeneutic circle in the form of dialogue, first with the elderly narrators and then with the tape-recorded material. Unlike five years previously, most of the narrators said they had now crossed the line into old age. These findings are considered in light of the concepts of ageing, bodiliness and temporality.

This article critically reviews the ways in which theories in social gerontology have been used to explain the influence of ethnicity and immigration on older adults. The purpose of this cursory examination is to explore how these theories can be used for further theory advancement without serious modifications to existing theories. Current theories do not have the capacity to capture the effects of immigration at the structural level and its link to the social, psychological and family levels, let alone the physical ageing of individuals or societies. The overriding complexity of ageing and immigration requires at minimum, a long-term view and an integrating framework with multiple levels that can accommodate a variety of theoretical interests. The conclusions are that a lifecourse perspective, in conjunction with existing theories, can be employed in two different ways to further this theoretical agenda. A lifecourse perspective provides scaffolding for other theories where seemingly incommensurate epistemological positions can be easily accommodated and the principles of the lifecourse can be integrated into existing theories for a more fine-grained analysis of ethnicity and immigration. These approaches leave the theoretical door open to everyone including the positivists, the constructionists and critical and postmodern scholars with the possibility for interdisciplinary theory building to advance the understanding of the lives of immigrant families.