Later life care practices are closely entangled with the ideals of independence and dependence. Based on an interpretive analysis of qualitative interviews with 34 people aged 65–100 receiving home care in Ontario, Canada, this article explores older people's subjective interpretations of caring for themselves (i.e. independence) and receiving support from others (i.e. dependence). Findings suggest that individuals construct subjective meanings of independence in relation to their changing physical capacities, and in the context of their relationships with family members, friends and formal care providers. First, participants considered their care activities to be a way of maintaining independence when they undertook certain practices with the intention of staving off dependency and future decline. Second, when they accepted assistance, many engaged in care relations that allowed them to preserve an independent identity in the face of limits to physical self-sufficiency. Third, participants reached the limits of independence when they lacked adequate assistance, and were unable to care for themselves in desirable ways. Findings illustrate how objective circumstances related to social and financial resources as well as access to formal services shape subjective interpretations, allowing some older people to hold on to independent identities while exacerbating feelings of dependency among others.

In policy debates it is commonly claimed that older workers are entering a period of choice and control. In contrast, Guy Standing's book The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class, published in 2011, argues that older people are increasingly joining the ‘precariat’, by taking low-level jobs to supplement dwindling pension incomes. We argue that many older workers, not just those in ‘precarious jobs’, feel a sense of ‘ontological precarity’. Pressures to work longer, combined with limited alternative employment prospects and inadequate retirement incomes, give rise to a heightened sense of precarity. We develop a new theoretical model for understanding precarity as a lived experience, which is influenced by the intersection between precarious jobs, precarious welfare states and precarious households. This model is then illustrated using qualitative research from two organisations in the United Kingdom: ‘Local Government’ and ‘Hospitality’. In both organisations, older workers experienced a sense of ontological precarity because they worried about the long-term sustainability of their jobs and saw limited alternative sources of retirement income. Household circumstances either reinforced interviewees’ sense of precarity, or acted as a buffer against it. This was particularly important for women, as they typically accrued smaller financial resources in their own right. Our concluding discussion builds on this more advanced theoretical understanding of older worker precarity to call for a rethinking of state and employer support for decisions around later-life working and retirement.

Similar to their younger counterparts, older adults (age 60+) are increasingly turning to online dating sites to find potential romantic and sexual partners. In this paper, we draw upon qualitative data from a thematic analysis of 320 randomly selected online dating profiles posted by Canadian heterosexual older adults who self-identified as Asian, Black, Caucasian or Native American. In particular, we examined how the older adults’ self-presentations varied according to race/ethnicity, age and gender, and how the language they used to describe themselves and their preferred potential partners reflected and reinforced idealised images of ageing. Our analysis identified five primary ways in which the older adults portrayed themselves. They depicted themselves as active and busy with cultural/artistic, social and adventurous activities; and also as physically healthy and intellectually engaged. Third, they emphasised the ways in which they were productive through work and volunteer activities. Fourth, they accentuated their positive approach to life, identifying themselves as happy, fun-loving and humorous individuals. Finally, they highlighted their personable characteristics, portraying themselves as trustworthy and caring. We discuss our findings with a particular focus on gender differences, drawing on literature on masculinity and femininity, and also look at capital and power relations by considering the online dating setting as a field in the Bourdieusian sense.

Frail older people worldwide are increasingly being cared for in their own homes by migrant live-in care workers; however, extant literature on care relationships in this care context is sparse. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore the quality and the nature of care relationships between full-time, live-in migrant care workers and older people in Israel. Quantitative and qualitative data were drawn from a 2014 survey of 116 migrant care workers and 73 older care recipients. Mean scores for four quantitative items relating to care relationships were examined and independent samples t-tests and Pearson correlations were performed, whereas qualitative data were examined using thematic analysis. Credibility of qualitative findings was checked by peer review. Most older people and migrant care workers gave high ratings to the four items. Significant correlations between the two groups were found for their responses on all four relationship items assessed, with only one item (‘get along well’) producing significant t-test differences. Qualitative data provided a deeper understanding of the quantitative ratings of care relationships. Four major qualitative themes emerged as inextricably tied with both groups’ perceptions of positive care relationships. These were: an emotional connection; reciprocity; effective communication; and meeting the older person's care needs. Study findings were interpreted through the theoretical lens of relationship-centred care. Implications of the findings for theory, practice and further research are discussed.

Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in the United States of America (USA) and are ageing rapidly. Few studies investigate whether older immigrants return to Mexico for different reasons than younger immigrants. Using the Mexican Health and Aging Study (N = 952), we examine whether Mexican immigrants in the USA who returned to Mexico at age 50 and older report different reasons for returning than those who returned at younger ages. Few immigrants (regardless of age) returned for economic reasons. The most commonly reported reason for returning for both groups was missing family. However, the odds of selecting missing family over illness as their main reason for returning were lower for older immigrants than younger immigrants after controlling for the duration of their stay in the USA and other socio-demographic factors (odds ratio (OR) = 0.27; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.11, 0.68). Results indicate that older immigrants were just as likely to report returning due to economic reasons and migration problems as they were to report returning because of illness (OR = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.15, 2.21; OR = 0.41, 95% CI = 0.12, 1.43). While existing research shows that older immigrants in the USA typically experience fewer migration problems and are often more economically stable than younger immigrants, our research suggests this may be entirely due to the duration of their stay in the USA.

The World Health Organization claims that mobility is vital to healthy ageing and is the best guarantee of older adults being able to cope and remain in their homes and communities. Mobility enables older adults to maintain their physical health, independence and participation in society. In general, mobility is examined objectively, from a quantitative perspective where mobility is measured as physical movement (e.g. physical activity) and/or travel behaviour (e.g. trips, modes and distances). The predominant focus on the functional aspects of mobility tends to overlook the subjective (e.g. perceptions, attitudes and motivations) and temporal dimensions of older adults’ mobility experiences. Using a constructivist grounded theory methodology, we conducted 24 in-depth interviews with six highly active community-dwelling older adults with low income, aged 65 or over, over a period of four years. Our analysis identified the following themes: maintaining a sense of self, being resourceful, openness to engagement, engaging in superficial contact, experiencing social capital, accessing transportation, leaving the immediate neighbourhood and facing affordability. Findings illustrate that intrapersonal factors, in addition to environmental (built, social and cultural) and temporal-level factors, play a crucial role in mobility. In the future, this gained knowledge can be incorporated into approaches to study the multiple interrelated factors and their interrelations that influence older adults’ mobility.

While research evidence indicates that older adults provide substantial amounts of financial, emotional and practical support to their adult children, little is known about the lifestyle-related drivers of providing such support or how these may be associated with changing late life in late modernity. Emerging popular discourses increasingly portray older adults as a group adopting new lifestyles, pursuing their own interests and rejecting normative family obligations. Using data from the Danish Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we examine first, cohort, age and period trends in the provision of informal support in 1997–2012 in Denmark; and second, the socio-economic and lifestyle factors associated with the likelihood of providing help to adult children. We find notably that, overall, older adults’ provision of informal support to their adult children has increased over time and that active lifestyles do not decrease the provision of support to adult children. However, in later mid-life (52–62 years), having full-time employment and high work-related stress decreases the likelihood of providing help. The results indicate that while older adults play an important role in providing support, external stressors such as work–life imbalance in later life may interfere with their engagement in intergenerational relationships.

As the population ages, older adults are increasingly expected to play multiple productive roles. This study examined how hours of paid or unpaid work were associated with volunteering among older Japanese. Data came from the 2012 National Survey of the Japanese Elderly, a nationwide survey of Japanese aged 60 and older (N = 1,324). We performed multinominal logistic regression analyses to predict volunteering (regular or occasional versus non-volunteer) based on hours of paid work and unpaid work for family consisting of sick/disabled care, grandchild care and household chores. Those who worked moderate hours were most likely to be a regular volunteer while working 150 hours or more per month had a lower probability of volunteering, regardless of whether the work was paid or unpaid. Thus, full-time level work competed with volunteering for both paid and unpaid work for family, but it was more so for paid work. By types of activities, doing household chores and substantial grandchild care were positively associated with volunteering, and the latter complementary relationship was explained by a larger community network among grandparents. Our findings indicate that delaying retirement from full-time paid work may reduce the supply of regular volunteers in the community. Thus, policies to increase part-time work for older adults as well as the types of volunteer work in which paid workers can participate are necessary.

This study analyses the remaking of dementia as a social and cultural phenomenon in the public media discourse in a welfare state Norway. A content analysis was carried out of articles on dementia published in Norwegian paper media from 1995 to 2015. The study combined the tools from quantitative corpus analyses and qualitative critical discourse analyses, making it possible to detect and interpret diachronic changes in the dementia discourse. Although the main focus in Norwegian dementia discourse has changed from the disease to the personhood, the agents defining what it means to live well with dementia continued to be predominantly institutional: non-governmental organisations, municipalities, health-care institutions and politicians. An analysis of the uses of the politically incorrect Norwegian term for dementia, ‘senility’, revealed that this term offered an alternative to the institutionalised dementia discourse and functioned as an unconventional and therapeutic-free space where older people and persons with dementia could use humour to subvert these norms and power relations.

Recent societal changes have increased the salience of non-kin relationships. It can be questioned whether network types that are more strongly non-kin-based give more informal care nowadays. We study how informal care use differs according to network type for three birth cohorts. Data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) on older adults aged 75–84 years, interviewed in 1992, 2002 and 2012, respectively (total sample size N = 2,151, analytical sample having functional limitations N = 926). We found four network types: restricted, family-focused with a partner, family-focused without a partner and wider community-focused diverse networks. Wider community-focused diverse networks are more common in the late birth cohort, whereas restricted networks and family-focused networks without a partner are less common. Logistic regression analyses reveal that those in a family-focused network with a partner use informal care more often than those in the other three network types, and insignificant interaction terms show that this does not differ by birth cohort. Irrespective of their network type, those in the late birth cohort use informal care less often. However, after controlling for need, predisposing and context factors, this cohort-difference is no longer significant. We conclude that despite large-scale societal changes, wider community-focused diverse networks do not provide more informal care than before and that among the functionally impaired, the odds of receiving informal care does not decline across birth cohorts.

Informal carers, also referred to as partners in care, provide the bulk of care to people living with dementia across a range of community settings; however, the changing experiences and contexts of providing informal care for people with dementia in rural settings are under-studied. Drawing on 27 semi-structured interviews with former partners in care in Southwestern and Northern Ontario, Canada, we examine experiences of providing and accessing care over the course of the condition and across various settings. Our findings illustrate the challenges associated with navigating the system of care, finding people who understand dementia in the surrounding community, negotiating hours of home support, facing resistance to respite from the person with dementia, and feeling pressured into long-term care. We argue that partners' time, bodies and choices are spatially constrained within rural and small-town settings and the current systems of home, community and long-term care.

Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future deficits, create demands for policy action today to address projected intergenerational inequalities. Taking Australia as a case study, this paper explores the politics of GA in public budgetary processes. While existing critiques reject GA by arguing it relies on ‘apocalyptic’ or unreliable demography, we focus on a different kind of contestation, which applies the techniques and even the categories of GA to frame different problems and promote different solutions. We identify three sites of partisan contest that refocus fiscal modelling: including the tax side of the budget equation; comparing the cost of public provision to public subsidies for private programmes; and including the costs of environmental damage. At each site, the future-orientated logic of GA is mobilised to contest the policy implications of austerity. This complicates analysis that financialisation and neoliberalism necessarily ‘de-politicise’ policy by removing state discretion. Instead, we identify an increasingly important, if technocratic, form of political contestation that offers the possibility to promote more egalitarian responses to population ageing.

With the predicted growth in the number of people with dementia living at home across the globe, the need for home-based care is expected to increase. As such, it will be primarily family carers who will provide this crucial support to family members. Designing appropriate support for family carers is thus essential to minimise risks to their health, to prevent premature institutionalisation or poor care for persons with dementia, as well as to sustain the effective functioning of health and social care systems. To date, the high volume of research related to care at home and acknowledged low impact of interventions suggests that a re-examination of the nature of care at home, and how we come to know about it, is necessary if we are to advance strategies that will contribute to better outcomes for families. This paper describes findings from an ethnographic study that was designed to support an analysis of the complexity and materiality of family care arrangements – that is, the significance of the actual physical, technological and institutional elements shaping care-giving situations. In this paper, we describe the arrangements made by one family to show the necessary collectivity of these arrangements, and the consequences of the formal care system's failure to respond to these.

The article analyses the norms of grandmothering in relation to cultural representations of active ageing. Based on interviews that were carried out with 20 mothers and 20 grandmothers of children under the age of ten, the article focuses on the way in which the current emphasis on activity influences ideas about how the roles of grandparent should be performed and how women relate to their own ageing. The analysis shows that being active represented a significant framework of the mothers’ notions and expectations associated with care provided by grandmothers, of grandmothers’ talk about their own grandparental role and how both generations of women interpret their own memories of their own grandmothers. Both the mothers and the grandmothers noted how the family role of grandmothers had changed compared to past generations of grandmothers. This change was framed by the idea of having an active lifestyle and this idea formed an important framework for the mothers’ expectations about what their role as grandmothers might be like in the future. This paper critically analyses those representations of the grandmother role and point out the emergence of new forms of conflicts and challenges, and the sense of ambivalence about traditional roles that result from the close association made between being active and the representation of grandmothering.

In the context of emerging challenges and opportunities associated with population ageing, the study of inequality in active-ageing outcomes is critical to the design of appropriate and effective social policies. While there is much discussion about active ageing at the aggregate country level, little is known about inequality in active-ageing experiences within countries. Based on the existing literature on active ageing, this paper proposes an individual-level composite active ageing index based on Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. The individual-level nature of the index allows us to analyse inequality in experiences of active ageing within selected European countries. One important motivation behind measuring active ageing at the individual level is that it allows for a better understanding of unequal experiences of ageing, which may otherwise be masked in aggregate-level measures of active ageing. Results show large differences in the distribution of individual-level active ageing across the 13 European countries covered and across age groups. Furthermore, there is a positive association between the country-level active ageing index and the equality of its distribution within a country. Hence, countries with the lowest average active ageing index tend to have the most unequal distribution in active-ageing experiences. For nine European countries, where temporal data are also available, we find that inequality in active-ageing outcomes decreased in the period 2004 to 2013.

This article is based on a study that used a validated care-giver assessment instrument known as ‘The C.A.R.E. (Caregivers’ Aspirations, Realities, and Expectations) Tool’ to understand its usefulness in working with older adults caring for a spouse with cognitive impairment. It draws on data collected as part of a larger, quasi-experimental pre- and post-test study examining the impact of a care-giver assessment on older spousal care-givers of a partner with cognitive impairment. One hundred community-living individuals (average age of 74) participated in the study. Participants met with a third-year nursing student who administered The C.A.R.E. Tool. Within three to seven days following this, a research team member conducted a semi-structured interview by telephone. This interview provided participants with the opportunity to comment on their experience and the usefulness of The C.A.R.E. Tool. Transcriptions of the interviews were analysed using a thematic analysis. Results indicate that the assessment experience was evaluated positively by most participants. Two broad themes emerged: assessment encourages care-givers to take stock of their situation, and it provides a relationship with a caring professional. In particular, the assessment experience gave these care-givers to have the opportunity to reflect, while expressing emotions and developing awareness, and provided them with an appreciated relationship with a caring professional who helped to validate and normalise their situation. For care-givers, the results suggest that assessment may serve as a catalyst for taking action in their care-giving situation or turning to services for help. For practitioners, assessment may increase awareness of the experience of spousal care-givers, potentially leading to interventions to support them. This study found that the attitudes and knowledge of practitioners play a role in care-givers’ experience of the assessment as positive. However, the goal of assessment must be clarified, as outcomes of other tools will differ depending on the aims.

This paper examines associations between early and mid-lifecourse events with economic activity in later life. These lifecourse trajectories are in turn examined for their impact on the pathways of men and women to retirement, including whether these pathways are perceived by individuals as been chosen or imposed. Data are from the three waves (2005, 2008 and 2011) of the French version of the Gender and Generations survey and comprise a sub-sample of 2,016 respondents in the birth cohort 1941–1960 who participated in all three waves. The analysis is undertaken within a gender perspective and in the context of the (de)standardisation of the lifecourse. The results show that mid-life and later-life work history, job category, employment sector and economic activity are influenced by early lifecourse events for both men and for women. Different pathways to retirement are observed according to institutional factors that determine access to pension rights. Women whose family formation occurred early, together with women who had an absence of family events (partnership or childlessness), were much more likely to be economically active in later life than men with the same characteristics. The results suggest that institutionalised (standardised) lifecourse patterns exist simultaneously with individualised (destandardised) patterns.

Person-centred care that respects a patient's personhood is the gold standard in dementia care, which is often difficult to achieve given the complexity of caring for people with dementia. This article delves into the narration style of formal care-givers from a variety of ethno-cultural backgrounds in search of linguistic cues that may be related to their emphasis on a person-centred approach to care. A qualitative study, using a discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews with 20 formal care-givers in an institutional setting, was employed. The care-givers fell into three groups: Arabs, immigrants from the former Soviet Union (IFSU) and Jews born in Israel (JBI). Our results show 20 figurative language expressions (FLEs) in the narratives of the JBI care-givers and 11 among the IFSU care-givers. In contrast, the Arab care-givers conveyed 48 FLEs. Many of the Arab care-givers’ FLEs were not associated with the ‘regular’ domains articulated by other care-givers (family, children, militaristic language) and were primarily individual-focused, emphasising the personhood of the patient. These findings, together with relevant theoretical literature, suggest that the extensive use of figurative language by Arab care-givers may be a possible tool assisting these care-givers to employ a person-centred approach, manifested in their stress on the personhood of the patient. Such tools may be useful for better achieving person-centred care for these patients.

Recent long-term care (LTC) reforms in the Netherlands are illustrative of those taking place in countries with a universalistic LTC model based on extensive provision of state-supported services. They entail a shift from de-familialisation, in which widely available state-supported LTC services relieve family members from the obligations to care for relatives in need, to supported familialism, in which family involvement in care-giving is fostered through support and recognition for families in keeping up their caring responsibilities. Using data from four waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 2,197), we show that between 2002 and 2014 the predicted probability that adult children provide occasional household support to impaired parents rose substantially. Daughters more often provided household support to parents than did sons, but no increase in the gender gap over time was found. We could not attribute the increase in children's provision of household support to drops in the use of state-supported household services. The finding that more and more adult children are stepping in to help their ageing parents fits a more general trend in the Netherlands of increasing interactions in intergenerational families.

It is well established that carriers of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele run a greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia and a strongly age-related condition known to disproportionally affect women. Low educational attainment also stands out as a prominent risk factor, and it has been suggested that occupational class plays a similar role in disease susceptibility. Not yet fully explored, however, is the question of whether socio-economic status (SES) could moderate the effect of APOE ε4. In the present paper, we address this issue. As substantial inequities in workforce participation and educational opportunities have existed between men and women in previous generations, we further examine whether SES-related moderations of the relationship between dementia and APOE ε4 are sex-specific. Our analyses are based on a sample of 580 individuals from the H70 Birth Cohort Study and the Prospective Population Study on Women in Gothenburg, Sweden. Data were analysed using Cox proportional hazards regression, and the results suggest that while high SES postpones dementia onset among male APOE ε4 carriers, this is not the case for women. These findings underscore the long-term impact of social inequity on health as well as the importance of considering potential interactions between social and genetic risk factors if we are to understand better the complex aetiology of dementia.