Recent research in Northern Ireland examining the needs and circumstances of informal carers has highlighted the personal and financial costs of caring. In this paper it is argued that these studies have taken no account of the particular expectations and attitudes towards informal care that exist within farm families. In these families there is a strong expectation that care for older relatives will take place almost entirely within the family. The reputation of the farm family within the local community is strongly dependent on their treatment of the older generation. Help from the state and the voluntary sector is extremely limited. Rather than being described as burdensome and difficult, these family arrangements are described as beneficial for everyone involved. It is argued that expectations and attitudes towards care within farm families are significantly different from those in non-farm families and policy makers and practitioners must take account of this in the context of care in the community.

During the 1990s, the British population has been urged by government and financial institutions to make more personal preparation for retirement and to begin doing so while they are still relatively young. This paper, set within a wider analysis of people's long-term planning behaviour, investigates the extent to which a sample of the general population of Kirkcaldy in Scotland, mostly aged between 30 and 49, has given thought to the question of retirement, feels they have made financial preparation for it, and also how comfortable they expect retirement to be. While it seems likely that early planning for retirement is more common today than 20 years ago, there remain substantial sections of the population, including – but going well beyond – many in lower income groups, who appear not to be preparing, for varying combinations of reasons (including family responsibilities, personal history, cultural and general orientation to life). The study concludes that planning for retirement must be seen as part of planning as a whole, and that the propensity to plan is the outcome of a complex web of material, social, cultural and psychological factors. This suggests that even very high profile urging from politicians and financial institutions is unlikely to deliver adequate pensions for significant sections of the UK population.

The aim of this article is to illustrate the changes in the Swedish system of old-age care during the 20th century by tracing and analysing the history of the job of supervisor or manager of this care. The main sources that have been researched are public and educational documents as well as articles from the occupation's professional journal. Development through different periods is described. During the first decades of the century, supervisors had a controlling function in strictly disciplined poor-relief institutions. The period 1920–1950 was dominated by a strong belief in institution-based old-age care, and the supervisor's role had a variety of profiles, e.g. matrons of home-like institutions, geriatric nurses, and manageresses of increasing numbers of care-staff. The decades 1950–1980, were characterised by expansion and new arenas, chiefly the home-help services. In the 1990s, with a strained public economy, the financial control became a central feature of the work of the managers. Finally, some of the changes and trends are analysed and discussed.

The effects of four social-structural neighbourhood characteristics on the relative size and the composition of neighbouring networks are tested in a sample of 3,504 older adults born between 1908 and 1937 and living in three different regions in the Netherlands. Interactions with individual income and ADL capacity are included in multilevel regression analyses, to test effects of older adults' environmental dependency. Population density and residential mobility both have a negative effect on the relative size of the neighbouring network, and the effect of urbanisation is strongest among poorer respondents. These findings suggest first that the structural effects of urbanisation work at the level of concentration vs. dispersion of personal networks, and second that there is no general mechanism of environmental dependency.

Most published research on informal care for older people focuses on the support provided by relatives. The role of non-kin carers can, however, also be significant in supporting older people in their own homes. In this paper, we report the findings from an exploratory study of the support provided by friends and neighbours who are the main carers of frail older people. It draws on interviews with an opportunistic sample of friends, neighbours and older people, which explored their views about the support arrangements, the reasons why help was provided and any difficulties experienced. Several friends and neighbours provided intensive and frequent help, and some played a key role in co-ordinating other services. One of the main forms of direct support related to older people's quality of life, at a broader level than the practical help provided by statutory services. The flexibility of such support, and the friends' and neighbours' concern for older people as individuals, were particularly important to the people they helped. Nevertheless, such help was not provided without costs to the carers. The study highlights the need for policy-makers and practitioners not to take help from friends and neighbours for granted and, in line with the White Paper Modernising Social Services, to provide the support services they need.

The research reported here is concerned with the future of informal care over the next thirty years and the effect of changes in informal care on demand for formal services. The research draws on a PSSRU computer simulation model which has produced projections to 2031 for long-term care for England. The latest Government Actuary's Department (GAD) 1996-based marital status projections are used here. These projections yield unexpected results in that they indicate that more elderly people are likely to receive informal care than previously projected. The underlying reason is that the GAD figures project a fall in the number of widows and rise in the number of elderly women with partners. What this implies is that ‘spouse carers’ are likely to become increasingly important. This raises issues about the need for support by carers since spouse carers tend to be themselves elderly and are often in poor health. The article explores a number of ‘scenarios’ around informal care, including scenarios in which the supply of informal care is severely restricted and a scenario in which more support is given to carers by developing ‘carer-blind’ services. This last scenario has had particular relevance for the Royal Commission on Long Term Care.

Age discrimination is one of the last forms of discrimination yet to be tackled by legislation. Despite the call of the United Nations for older people to be treated fairly, regardless of age, many industries still overtly discriminate against them. The advertising industry is a particular offender, either ignoring older people altogether or presenting them in caricatures or negative stereotypes. The authors suggest that regulation or legislation may be required, to raise awareness of the issues surrounding age discrimination and to persuade advertisers to present images of older people which are more relevant and acceptable in today's society.

This paper examines the sociodemographic characteristics, health condition, and problems in the activities of daily living of two groups of older Texas state prisoners. The research group, assigned to a geriatric facility, were primarily Anglos who had committed violent crime. Few admitted to having a drinking problem but most admitted to a daily smoking habit. Most rated their current health condition as fair or poor; many used special equipment to aid their movement and breathing. Their self-rated health condition was worse than that of a comparison group of older inmates drawn from the general population of the prison. Inmates and health-care providers agreed that separate facilities for older prisoners are desirable. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for prison management and future policy.

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.

Private residential care homes in the United Kingdom have undergone a variety of management changes in recent years, many resulting from the impacts of national policy changes. During the 1980s, the private residential sector for older persons enjoyed substantial financial support for the care of residents. However, since the 1990 National Health Service and Care in the Community Act was implemented in 1993, homes have had to compete with each other in a market, for a finite number of clients funded by limited local budgets held by local authority purchasers. Based on a three-stage quasi-longitudinal survey of over 100 residential care homes in one county, this paper considers changes in the overall size and structure of a local sector and discusses the specific management strategies that have been adopted by proprietors. The withdrawal of guaranteed state support has impacted heavily on residential home businesses. Indeed, many homes have multiple vacancies and have been facing financial hardships. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical and moral issues associated with certain management decisions and their possible effects on residents.

It was timely that the 1999 International Year of Older Persons (IYOP) occurred in the last year of the century because the purpose of the year is to celebrate ageing achievements as well as to produce positive sustainable change for the future. Thus it affords an opportunity to assess the status of ageing in Australia as a result of developments up to that point, as well as providing an indication of where ageing research, policy and practice is headed in the new century. This paper examines the IYOP in Australia as a measure of achievements to date, and then focuses on its major output, the proposed National Strategy for an Ageing Australia, as a look ahead. This follows a brief review of some socio-demographic data on ageing in Australia at the end of the century, and a summary of research on ageing as recorded in the Australian Ageing Research Directory (Office for the Aged 1993, 1996).

Obituaries and other accounts of well-known people at their death offer a narrative defining identity through the life story. It is particularly poignant when the story is told of an author, and draws upon not only life course metaphors but also features of the author's fiction. In this paper we look at a case where the dementia of a famous author figures in the tributes at her death. The predominant narrative of dementia has until recently been that of a tragic loss of self. This has reinforced an image of social death. Biomedical determinism has similarly focused on the disease, rather than seeing the person and allowing their voice to be heard. While Iris Murdoch may not have wanted tributes to tell her story, they have allowed us to examine conventional narratives of a person with dementia. We chart the ‘career’ of a person with dementia, and their perceived transformation of identity, defined in terms of being demented rather than with dementia. Bad and good are attributed to aspects of Iris Murdoch's life through a repertoire of available stereotypes. These appear to involve the retrospective application of characteristics of dementia, along with those of goodness and purity. Common gender representations relating to Iris Murdoch's married life and the caring situation are interwoven in the accounts. We are told a story that reflects and reproduces conventional narratives of the life course and of dementia, characterising the deceased in terms of a moral career.

I wrote a newspaper article describing a branch of the University of the Third Age (U3A). It was given the sub-title ‘It keeps us young’ by the editor without my knowledge or consent. I objected on the grounds that it gave a totally misleading impression of the nature and purpose of the U3A, one which may lead people to suppose that members were striving to be ‘young’. This experience raised the question of the language used to describe those in the Third Age, a controversy in which a number of contemporary gerontologists are involved. It is suggested that some writers are reinforcing the concept of ‘the Ghost in the Machine’ that is commonly held by many lay people, and this leads to confusion about self-identity among those in later life. It is argued that elderly people will be able to map out strategies for successful ageing only if they come to terms with accepting themselves as being old. Longstanding ageist prejudice has tended to create a negative aura surrounding words such as ‘elderly’ and such words need to be rehabilitated.

Dementia studies are currently dominated by biomedical and psychological models that focus on the individual without regard to their socio-cultural context (Bond 1992, 1999; Lyman 1989; Harding and Palfry 1997; Whitehouse et al. 2000). There is now a growing interest in how socio-cultural factors may mediate the experience of, and response to, dementia (Holstein 1998). The purpose of this review is to examine this growing interest in the socio-cultural context of dementia with reference to earlier developments in disability studies (Oliver 1990; Thomas 1999) and ageing research in general (Estes et al. 1984). The implications of placing dementia in a socio-cultural context for research, policy and practice will be discussed.

Most of the theoretical work on dementia has been devoted to pointing out the inadequacies of biomedical and psychological models in which problems are attributed solely to an individual's neuropathology with a simultaneous neglect of socio-cultural factors (Binney and Swan 1991; Lyman 1989; Harding and Palfry 1998; Kitwood 1998). The study of dementia, it is argued, has been limited by the broader ‘biomedicalisation of ageing’ whereby problems of ageing have been attributed to the ‘tragedy’ of the individual's pathology rather than as a function of an inadequate societal response. Robertson (1991) describes how people so labelled are referred to as ‘victims’ or ‘sufferers’. All difficulties in the person's life are attributed to their underlying disease with a consequent neglect of social and environmental factors that may ameliorate or prevent such ‘symptoms’.

In recent years, we gerontologists have been forced to re-examine the conceptual base of our work – both in the wake of developments in postmodernist thought, and following the emergence of ageism as a media issue. Two particular problems have been addressed: one is how we recognise and define age in the context of the partly-disaggregated individual human being: body, mind, self, identity, etc. The second is how we relate to popular sentiments, judgements and objectives regarding age: thinking positively, being prejudiced, remaining active, being a burden, etc. On both fronts there has been a shift away from emphasising the significance of age, and one often reads such arguments as: people do not change, they remain the same; but they can continue to develop; but there is a massive diversity; so we must not generalise about age or prejudge older people; and so on. It is not difficult to associate these trends with powerful ideological movements. There is a third issue that lies just beneath the surface: how we gerontologists theorise our own personal experience of ageing.

‘Ageing of the population is … one of the most important socioeconomic challenges … for the 21st Century’ Andrej Wojrczak, Director, WHO Centre Health Development, Japan.

This statement (WHO 1998: 5), reflects the growing awareness among politicians, policy makers and the general public of issues which have been recognised by gerontologists for the past 30 years or so. In both developed and less developed countries, demographic transition and the shift in the age structure of the population is now being publicly recognised as having fundamental implications for everyone in society. As British gerontology enters a new century, the time appears ripe to reflect on past achievements and highlight some future questions. In the following discussion I consider ageing and later life, discussing both societal and individual ageing, and the experiences, needs and contributions of those in later life. The paper focuses on social gerontology, defined as social, behavioural, historical, demographic and economic aspects of the study of ageing and later life, including the interface of these with health and health services. It thus touches upon medical and biological aspects only when they are of appropriate relevance.