Experience Of Old Age Research Articles

Social Security privatization and older women: A feminist political economy perspective

Gender is a crucial organizing principle in society that profoundly shapes the experience of old age and aging and the distribution of resources to older women. Using a critical feminist perspective, this paper looks at privatization in the context of the state, the capital, and the sex and gender system that conjointly reproduce the dominant institutions that render women, and particularly women of color, vulnerable and dependent throughout their life courses. The substantial dependency of older women on the state and its reasons are described. The proposed privatization of Social Security is examined in terms of its gender-biased ideological underpinnings and assumptions about the nature and norms of work, productivity, individualism, interdependence, and exchange. Negative effects are particularly harsh for those older women who do not conform to the model of family status as married with male breadwinner and for those already disadvantaged by race, ethnicity, and class.

Moving to `Age-appropriate' Housing: Government and Self in Later Life

This article seeks to explore new ways of understanding and researching old age by drawing on Foucauldian analysis. The focus is on the government of populations and of the self, in a changing welfare climate. Recent theoretical developments in sociology have problematized dominant cultural and social constructions of ageing, and the ways in which old people make sense of their ageing selves against these normalizing processes, by highlighting the relevance of structural processes on the experience of old age. Drawing upon an exploratory study designed to explore the housing histories of older people, we evaluate the usefulness of a Foucauldian-based analysis as a way of bringing out the complexity of older people's lives and identity construction in a changing cultural context. The Foucauldian concept of government is proposed as a useful tool for accessing the interaction of broad structural processes with processes constitutive of old age.

Selling Off the Great Society

It is almost forty years since the on began, but its presence still colors virtually every aspect of contemporary American life. The endeavor to eradicate poverty in affluent, post-World War II America was a messy affair, rife with contradictions. It created new layers of bureaucracy, new labyrinths of rules, more than its share of unworkable programs, and rafts of unintended consequences. Within a decade it had doubled the fraction of the GNP devoted to social welfare, largely through the construction of public health insurance systems for the old and the very poor. It changed the experience of old age in America, by cutting an elderly American's odds of falling into poverty (which were still 4 in 10 in 1959) by almost two thirds. It saw the population on public assistance grow blacker and browner, more feminized, and much larger as a tide of rising expectations breached many of the barriers of shame and humiliation that poor relief officials had historically counted on to dissuade Americans from asking for public assistance. And it reduced income inequality for the last time in the twentieth century before the relentless, post-1970 march toward ever greater economic inequality began. By the end of the war on poverty's first decade, there were nine million fewer Americans trying to scrape life together below the poverty line than before, a number roughly four times the total population of the state of Mississippi at the time.

Baby you can Drive my Bed: Technology and Old Age in Japanese Animated Film

Narratives of Japan's maturation as a postindustrial society raise critical interest in narratives of personal and collective maturation within the most rapidly aging population in the world. Japanese popular culture is a rich source of representations of tensions between institutional projects of modernization and significant cultural and social changes that these projects have unintentionally engendered. The animated movie Rōjin-Z represents the tensions between the experience of old age and high technology and draws attention to how technologies of care are not always socially and culturally attuned to personal biographies. This article proposes linkages between representations of old age, postmodernization of the life course, and structural changes shaped by information technologies in contemporary Japan.

Changing patterns of death and dying

This paper reviews changing patterns of mortality worldwide, paying particular attention to differences between developed and developing countries and the consequences of demographic and epidemiological transitions. These involve gains in life expectancy and a shift from infectious to degenerative conditions as causes of death. Reversals to these transitions in certain Eastern European and African countries, due respectively to the social disorganisation accompanying the collapse of communism and to AIDS is described. The implications of changing population structures for the experience of old age and dying are explored and gender and socio-economic differences within countries is highlighted. The current state of knowledge about differences in the dying trajectories of different causes of death is summarised and gaps in this knowledge identified. The availability of lay health care in the community at different points in the demographic transition is described, and the problems and dilemmas of formal health care provision for dying people in both developed and developing countries outlined, including an analysis of the reasons for public support for euthanasia in some Western countries. In particular, the appropriateness of models of specialist palliative care outside the cultures in which such care originally developed is questioned. Finally, there is discussion of the extent to which medical and scientific measures erode traditional religious consolations for the problems involved in dying and bereavement.

Ageing and old age in pre-industrial Africa: elderly persons among 19th-century Xhosa-speaking peoples

Thusfar, African gerontologists have not attended to precolonial ageing, except to subscribe to a timeless perspective rooted in modernization theorys 'golden age narrative.' This paper sketches some dimensions of the ageing experience in a pre-industrial African nation, the Xhosa-speaking societies in South Africa. It begins with a reconstruction of precolonial residence patterns and the economic status of elderly persons before it turns to the issue of cultural representations of ageing and old age in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Notwithstanding the intimate association of (male) ageing with accumulation of economic resources, the belief in ancestors functioned as a fundamental instrument by which old-age authority was upheld, apart from its colouring the very notion of Xhosa old age. Having examined the religious basis of the ageing experience, finally the gendered nature of old-age security is discussed. In a nutshell, it is argued that even though age was different in social and cultural terms and was thus an important aspect of any individual's identity, age alone never defined any persons economic status or social identity. Gender and kinship, but also biographically conditioned factors, affected the experience of old age. The notion of old age as an abstract entity is a Western-based construct which reflects an ageist conception, i.e. (chronological) old age as the determinant of old people's identity, and the inadequate comprehension of other prime social processes that moulded the lives of elderly persons rather than the reality of old age in precolonial Xhosa communities.

Narratives of age and uprootedness among older Cambodian refugees

This article examines Cambodian refugees' beliefs and traditions about age from the perspective of the cultural life course. Drawing on a study of 39 Cambodians between the ages of 50 and 79, the article explores the process of life reorganization from the standpoint of social liminality. The narratives of these refugees illustrate how cultural traditions shape views of who is old. Moreover, these narratives illustrate how gender roles and their loss, as well as factors that mitigate role loss, shape the experience of old age. It is concluded that (1) subscribing to the traditional cultural template for the Cambodian life course provides a sense of continuity in the face of disruption, and (2) the Cambodian family, as a central social institution, serves as a vehicle for role continuity, role loss, and the management of conflict. The extended family thus continues to be a primary source of meaning as elders reorganize their lives in old age.

Growing old and resistance: towards a new cultural economy of old age?

This paper investigates the modalities of the government of old people in contemporary society by looking critically at current social gerontological discourse and the claims to truth it makes about the experience of growing and being old, and its impact on the cultural economy of old age. Recent theoretical developments in sociology have problematised dominant cultural, social and academic constructions of ageing and the ways in which old people make sense of their ageing selves against these normalising processes. The impact of structural processes on the experience of old age has been highlighted, dominant discursive practices in relation, for instance, to the care of old people have been deconstructed and spaces of resistance have been identified. At the same time, social gerontology has turned its attention to positive or successful ageing and its payback for individual old people and policy-makers. However, because it is embedded in a broader discourse which gives primacy to lifestyles, social and economic opportunities and moral responsibility, successful ageing is an ambiguous project caught between resisting the mask of ageing and reaffirming the continued cultural repression of the declining body and, by extension, of the ageing self. Recent findings from an on-going life history project involving old people who have moved to ‘age-appropriate’ housing will be used to illustrate the extent to which people who are now old have appropriated new forms of regulation.

Die ouderdommetafoor vanuit ’n kognitlewe vertrekpunt

A cognitive approach to metaphors concerning old age Old age is a universal experience. Poets in general and certain Afrikaans poets in particular use imagination and metaphor to understand and interpret the experience of old age and approaching death. To understand one domain of experience in terms of another we need metaphor which unites reason and imagination. The purpose of this article is to apply the cognitive approach to disclose the main conceptual domains which act as source domains and are projected onto the target domain of old age. The resulting metaphors describe the experience of old age and its physical and psychological infirmities and decay. The poet as abstract author, but also the reader, creatively and imaginatively recognize a schema in a new situation and contrive metaphorical connections between various conceptual structures. Thus a metaphorical expression links two or more domains of experience. Structures from two or more input source domains are projected onto a separate “blended” space, which inherits structure partially from the inputs, and has emergent structure of its own. It is argued that creativity shows rationality and structure. The examples reveal that the path, cycle and time domains are the more important source domains for the old age metaphors. The metaphors do not only describe the authors' emotions on experiencing old age, but also create emotions in the reader. The conclusion arrived at is that language is inextricably entrenched in our cognitive make-up, as illustrated by the various metaphors conveying the experience of old age.

Resisting institutionalization: Constructing old age and negotiating home

This article explores how biology, culture and the physical and social environments mutually inform the experience of old age. Findings drawn from a twelve- month ethnographic study of a Canadian supportive housing building show that home space provides the material resources necessary for the senior tenants to maintain their independence, sustain a meaningful existence, and resist institutionalization. Conclusions confirm that the engagement between place, culture, and health deterioration is more complex than suggested by conventional models based on biological, cultural or geographical causality.

Modernity and Identity: Themes and Perspectives in the Study of Older Adults

Developments in social gerontology have led to an increased awareness of the relationship between political economy, culture, and personal narrative as influences on social identity in later life. Central to this debate has been a growing interest in lifestyle choice as evidence of a change from modern to postmodern forms of aging. A key component of this process has been the erosion of a predictable framework for an aging identity, previously supplied by the welfare state. It is argued that, alongside the emergence of “no-care zones” in health and welfare, postmodern ideas on consumerism and the body have led to an assault on identity in old age. As a result, we may be seeing the emergence of “no-identity zones” which fail to sustain an authentic framework for supporting experiences in old age. A critical gerontology should include the study of identity as central to understanding the disjunction between aging from within and aging within society.

What underlies the deficit in reported recollective experience in old age?

In recognition memory, older adults report fewer occasions on which recognition is accompanied by recollection of the original encoding context. This study asks why this occurs. Two main hypotheses were tested: (1) Older adults fail to encode the items sufficiently when first they experience them. (2) Older adults have a retrieval deficit that prevents efficient reintegration of target and context. In addition, the hypothesis that frontal lobe integrity is essential for recollective experience was examined. Twenty older (mean age 70.7 years) and 20 younger (mean age 22.9 years) adults were asked to study a list of items and to verbalize the strategies they were using to remember. A further 20 older adults (mean age 70.0 years) were tested without the think-aloud protocol. Subsequently, subjects completed a battery of psychometric tests before completing a recognition test. As expected, older adults showed less recollective experience. They differed from the young in how they encoded the material, and once this difference was accounted for, no age differences in recollective experience remained. There was little evidence to support the hypothesis that frontal lobe integrity plays a role in the reduction of recollective experience with age.

Loneliness, loss and grief: an experience of old age

Elderly people needing occupational therapy often experience multiple losses, the sequelae of which may be misunderstood by therapists. Recognition of those losses and an understanding of the attribution of meaning to those losses by the elderly person is an important task for the therapist. Control-enhancing programmes should be introduced to encourage greater self-efficacy and autonomy.

Cultural Scripts and the Social Integration of Older People

The cultural strategies for the social integration of older people within their families of the three major ethnic groups in Singapore, the Chinese, Malays and Indians, is the focus of this paper. Analysis of data reveals three underlying principles, namely, reciprocity, elders as transmitters of cultural heritage, and the social significance of auspicious days and festivals. Taken together, the principles and strategies indicate the salient impact of cultural factors on the subjective experience of old age.

Continuity after a stroke: implications of life-course disruption in old age.

Life-course disruption caused by a stroke and subsequent attempts on the part of stoke victims to restore continuity was explored through qualitative research with a sample of 216 persons. This research suggests: 1) that theory in gerontology could be deepened by framing continuity to include discontinuous experience in late life; and 2) that research on what elderly persons themselves make of continuity--how they perpetuate it or recreate it and the obstacles they perceive in doing so--may inform our understanding of the experience of old age and lead to applications in the practice of gerontology that address the disruption illness poses for people's lives.

Gender, aging and power in sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges and puzzles

By 2020, the absolute numbers of elderly in Africa will increase dramatically. A majority of these will be women. While we know much about the powers and authority of male elders within formal kin- and age-based structures, we know little about the lived experience of aging in Africa today, and even less about the formal and informal roles of elderly women. These ethnographic descriptions of gendered aging experiences in seven African societies examine the following little explored topics: indigenous conceptions of gender and aging; the ambiguities in women's social positions; changing family, household and marital relationships, which affect experiences of old age; older persons' access to and control over material, human and suprahuman resources; and the interplay of indigenous and modern forces. They point to future research challenges that will include understanding indigenous notions of gender and aging, and power and personhood, as they relate to personal experiences and to the ability of older women and men to assure their security in contexts of rapid social change.

Caring for China's Ageing Population: The Residential Option — A Case Study of Shanghai

ABSTRACTChina is a rapidly ageing nation. With nearly 10 % of its population over sixty, forecasts predict that this proportion will double by 2025. Such ageing is particularly acute in some of the large cities, where the impact of population policies has combined with lengthening life expectancies, to increase rapidly the percentages of elderly residents. Following a brief review of health and welfare policies directed towards elderly people, the paper draws on documentary and field research, carried out in Shanghai, to assess the current development and administration of residential homes in that city. Using a variety of case- study material the paper discusses the current situation of residents in relation to their former life experiences. It appears that in communist China, as in western democracies, former positions and allegiances in younger life help construct the experience of old age.

Nurses may help people to enjoy their old age.

Attitudes to the care of elderly people must change if they are to enjoy the experiences of old age, a new report argues.

Usual vs. successful aging: Some notes on experiential factors

A common analogy to aging is that of a boulder being worn down to rubble by the unremitting onslaught of time. In contrast, Swaab's “use it or lose it” concept is important because it emphasizes some positive consequences of experience. For example, early exposure to complex experience may offer some protection from “wear and tear” degradation through improvements in vascular support, diet, exercise, and coping with stress. Exposure to complex experience in old age can also generate new synapses in the cerebral cortex and cerebellum. This new perspective is not completely positive, however, because it appears that the senescent breakdown of supporting systems may ultimately constrain the positive benefits of experience in old age. Thus the evidence indicates that the use of environmental therapies should encompass the entire life span to produce successful aging.

Models of old age among the Samia of Kenya: Family support of the elderly

Family support for the elderly is a growing concern in contemporary subsaharan Africa. Presented here are 3 case studies of elderly Samia, a Luyia subgroup in western Kenya, which illustrate different experiences of old age among rural Africans living under conditions of modernization and rapid socio-economic change. These mini-biographies demonstrate the continued salience of family support networks in the lives of elderly Samia. They are examples ("models of") more and less successful aging as variations on the Samia (and African) theme of familial interdependence. These personal experiences are compared with Samia ideologies ("models for") old age and are also examined in a theoretical framework combining ideas of the life course with exchange theory and the concept of lifetime intergenerational reciprocity (Caldwell 1982). Data come from two years' ethnographic research (1983-85), including participant observation, informal and focused interviews, collection of life history materials, and a survey of 416 older Samia women and men using a questionnaire with both closed and open-ended questions which was designed during the research and administered by Samia assistants.