Ageing, Meaning and the Allocation of Resources

Between activity and solidarity: Comprehending retirement and extended working lives in Swedish rural areas

The expected costs of population ageing have generally led to perceived needs to postpone the age of retirement. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews, the aim of this paper is to describe the ways that the possibility of an extended working life is comprehended by persons over the age of 60 living in sparsely populated areas in northern Sweden. While defining themselves as active, the interviewees argued strongly in favour of the right to retire. What are often described as opposing retiree subject positions - healthy and active vs. vulnerable and dependent - were partly transgressed in the interviews. The interviewees performed a solidarity that had the potential of including their future selves as possible objects of solidarity. Another important result was that in comprehending the possibility of an extended working life, morally charged notions of geographic place became central.

Negotiating the demands of active ageing: longitudinal findings from Germany

The challenges of population ageing and globalisation have been addressed by many welfare states in terms of active ageing policies, which in turn confront individuals with new demands such as keeping up to date with technological developments. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how individuals negotiate the demands of active ageing. The outcome variable was change in primary and secondary control strategies with regard to demands of active ageing over the course of one year. In a German sample of N = 602 men and women aged 55–75 years, we found a strong preference for engagement with these demands and a low preference for disengagement. Furthermore, a higher load of demands of active ageing was associated with an increase in engagement with these demands. However, when people perceived their everyday surroundings as unfavourable, their disengagement with demands of active ageing increased. Higher internal control beliefs concerning demands of active ageing were associated with an increase in engagement and a decrease in disengagement. We conclude that individuals strengthen their efforts to master demands of active ageing when they believe that they can control them. When the everyday ecology seems unfavourable, though, strategies are preferred that enable people to avoid a presumably lost case.

The Global Activity Limitation Index measured function and disability similarly across European countries

OBJECTIVE

This work aims to validate and increase understanding of the Global Activity Limitation Index (GALI), an activity limitation measure from which the new structural indicator Healthy Life Years is generated.

STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING

Data from the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe, covering 11 European countries and 27,340 individuals older than 50 years, was used to investigate how the GALI was associated with other existing measures of function and disability and whether the GALI was consistent or reflected different levels of health in different countries.

RESULTS

The GALI was significantly associated with the two subjective measures of activities of daily living score and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) score, and the two objective measures of maximum grip strength and walking speed (P<0.001 in all cases). The GALI did not differ significantly between countries in terms of how it reflected three of the health measures, with the exception being IADL.

CONCLUSION

The GALI appears to satisfactorily reflect levels of function and disability as assessed by long-standing objective and subjective measures, both across Europe and in a similar way between countries.

Not just old and sick – the ‘will to health’ in later life

The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism in the 1970s was the prelude to a period of greater individualisation within societies and was accompanied by an increase in the importance of consumption as a way of organising social relations. During the same period there was also an expansion in the discourses aimed at enhancing the government of the autonomous self. One such discourse operates around what has been termed the ‘will to health’: it suggests that health has become a required goal for individual behaviour and has become synonymous with health itself. The generational groups whose lifecourses were most exposed to these changes are now approaching later life. We explore the extent to which social transformations related to risk, consumption and individualisation are reflected in the construction of later-life identities around health and ageing. We examine how the growth in health-related ‘technologies of the self’ have fostered a distinction between natural and normal ageing, wherein the former is associated with coming to terms with physical decline and the latter associated with maintaining norms of self-care aimed at delaying such decline. Finally, we consider anti-ageing medicine as a developing arena for the construction of later-life identities and discuss the implications of the social changes for researching later life.

[Images and discourses of ageing--annotations to the state of research]

Up to now, images of ageing are considered unilaterally from an individualising perspective in which the cause for negative images as well as the starting point for potential change is localised in cognitive attitude patterns. In this contribution we plead for a conceptual extension of the research on images of ageing which also encloses societal discourses and body images. Images and discourses of ageing and associated ideas of man also reflect the intentions and images of social interest groups. Hence, an important research assignment should be to examine existing images and discourses of ageing critical for their ideological, cultural and societal implications.

The nurses' aide: past and future necessity

Popular images of nursing, largely based on Victorian ideals, have tended to ignore the role played by the unqualified nurse. Yet nurses' aides have been described as providing the backbone of health services and in many clinical areas have traditionally performed the greater part of basic nursing care. Demographic pressures, including increased numbers of elderly people with health care needs and the reduction in the number of school leavers entering nursing, together with reforms in nurse education, will mean that the demand for nurses is likely to continue to outstrip supply. The nurses' aide is likely to remain indispensible to nursing provision in the United Kingdom. Despite the contribution of unqualified nurses, little attention has been paid historically to their training needs. Studies have attempted to compare the effectiveness of qualified staff with that of nurses' aides, even though the latter have received little or on training. The validity of such approaches is questionable since 'unqualified' and 'untrained' have been accepted as synonymous by the nursing profession. Other studies which have looked at the caring abilities of unqualified staff suggest that despite their lack of training they have the potential to deliver therapeutic care as long as trained nurses provide appropriate role models within a therapeutic unit philosophy. The value of the qualified nurse may in fact involve the organization of care rather than hands on care alone.