Journal of Aging Studies最新文献

{"title":"Reassessing the goals of musical activities for people living with dementia: Supporting joint agency, selfhood and couplehood with an embodied and relational approach","authors":"Justin Christensen,&nbsp;Renee Timmers,&nbsp;Jennifer MacRitchie","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101289","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101289","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A risk present in medically informed psychosocial interventions for dementia, including musical interventions, is the potential to overly prioritise the reduction of cognitive decline, which can inadvertently emphasise deterioration and loss of skills and capacities. This focus can lead to disempowering people living with dementia rather than supporting and building on the skills that remain. In this paper, we present approaches linked with a more positive outlook on dementia, examining the strengths that continue in people living with dementia, as evidenced by how they engage in musical activities. We pay specific attention to how people living with dementia use embodied and relational ways of being and interacting with others, as well as the benefits that musical engagement can provide to selfhood, couplehood and agency in a context of change and adaptation due to the development of the condition. We propose a shift in perspective that takes advantage of music's affordances for embodied communication and connection, recognising people living with dementia as active agents with strengths in habituated ways of acting. With this shift we examine how couples can scaffold each other's abilities to reach towards a balanced sense of reciprocity. To further support this balanced reciprocity through embodied and relational aspects of musical participation, we make a proposal for the design of assistive music technologies that will support notions of we-perspective, joint agency and joint action, with each of these providing wellbeing benefits for people living with dementia and their carers. Drawing on the potential effects that embodiment and relationality have on agency, selfhood and couplehood in musical engagement, we present a case for reassessing the goals and design of musical activities and the technologies to support them.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101289"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Radio dramatization of aging in Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache","authors":"Chen Su","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101290","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101290","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines Harold Pinter's 1959 radio play <em>A Slight Ache</em> through the lens of aging. It argues that Pinter utilizes sound-based techniques to heighten the introspective crisis of aging experienced by the protagonist Edward. The matchseller in the play serves as an auditory doppelgänger, representing Edward's unresolved conflict between his youthful self-image and his aging body, a struggle that drives the play's psychological depth. Moreover, the article explores Edward's loneliness via his one-sided dialogues and emotive pauses, as well as his disoriented experience of time and space in his process of aging. Pinter's innovative use of radiophonic devices enhances the introspective depth, encouraging listeners to engage with Edward's experience on a deeply personal level and a more empathetic view of the complexities of growing older.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101290"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142702648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How do we understand ‘age’ and ‘aging’? Cultural constructions of the ‘aging’ experience in British English and Chinese from a linguistic perspective","authors":"Taochen Zhou","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101288","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101288","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the cognitive constructions surrounding the aging experience in British English and Mandarin Chinese. The study employs corpus data to explore how fixed phrases manifest the perceptions of ‘age’, ‘aging’, and by extension ‘old age’. It lays out the linguistic patterns that are common in each language. By analyzing the similarities and differences, the findings show that the same biological phenomenon is not expressed in the same linguistic patterns consistently across languages, and that culture plays an important role in structuring conceptual preferences. Most distinctively, ‘age’ in Chinese can be a separate entity with an upward-oriented path on the aging JOURNEY which is unfound in English. This study sheds light on the associations between language, thought and culture to foster sensitive communication under the background that aging perceptions may have an impact on older adults' general wellbeing and health behavior.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101288"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142702650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Socio-spatial analysis of Australian residential care facilities: A case study of traditional, medium, and small household models","authors":"Sarah McGann ,&nbsp;Holly Farley ,&nbsp;Caroline Bulsara ,&nbsp;Anahita Sal Moslehian","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101287","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101287","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While it is imperative to develop building design innovation to adapt to new care models and organisational processes in residential care facilities, there is a lack of research evidence on the interplay between design and resident lived experience, particularly when examined through a building design lens. This study aims to explore the building design factors that contribute to residents' quality of life (QoL), and thus, their ability to find <em>home</em>. The research objectives are to: 1) document and analyse the layout and spatial design of three different typologies (Traditional, Medium, and Small Household models) against key QoL themes and the residents' everyday lived use and sense of feeling at <em>home</em>; and 2) compare the architectural, layout, and lived use of the three typologies through a socio-spatial lens. Employing a mixed methods approach, incorporating architectural and ethnographic research strategies, we identified six key design concepts encompassing 14 factors that might be related to residents' quality of life. The research highlights distinct everyday lived use and spatial adaptation among the three building typologies, with the Small Household case study standing out for providing an excellent holistic setting, resulting in high levels of observed QoL. This paper also suggests practical insights into improving building design briefs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101287"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142702649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aging together-with: The growing older of humans, non-humans and more-than-humans. A commentary","authors":"Stephen Katz","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101280","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101280","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This Commentary discusses the key areas of thought brought together in this special issue on ‘Aging Together-With: The Growing Older of Humans, Non-Humans and More-Than-Humans’, edited by Michela Cozza and Anna Wanka. In particular, the articles in this issue present original and insightful discussions about the relational, material, embodied and interactive nature of ‘aging together-with’ environments, technologies, animals and pets, and more, across plural and hybrid temporalities and vital spaces of life. My writing both looks outward to where this issue critiques and advances current trends in aging studies and inward to reflect on my own contributions to these trends.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101280"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142654614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hidden in plain sight: Women and gendered dementia dynamics in the Australian Aged Care Royal Commission","authors":"Kristina Chelberg ,&nbsp;Linda Steele","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101285","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101285","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Dementia is known to unequally affect women, whether as women living with dementia, or women who provide unwaged or paid care, yet dementia and long-term care (‘LTC’) research and policy often ignore gender. Using Australia as a case study and building on critical dementia, critical disability, and feminist scholarship, this discourse analysis study explored representations in the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (‘ACRC’) Final Report of experiences of women with dementia, and women care partners of people with dementia, using long-term care. This paper argues gender remained an overlooked topic in relation to dementia in the ACRC Final Report. This paper found women and dementia were co-constructed according to normative gendered scripts of passive femininity. In particular, harms experienced by women with dementia in long-term care were overlooked, while the feminised labour of women care partners was taken for granted. In failing to address normative gendered patterns, the ACRC Final Report entrenches rather than unseats marginalisation of women in dementia research and policy and is a missed opportunity to address gendered labour, discrimination and harms in long-term care. Ultimately, the paper highlights the need to recognise long-term care as a key site for critical dementia and feminist scholarly and activist interventions and intersectional approaches in reforms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101285"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142654196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Four modes of embodiment in later life","authors":"Hans-Georg Eilenberger ,&nbsp;Jenny Slatman","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101284","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101284","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Today’s social gerontology of the body consists of an archipelago of different ideas and approaches. Social constructionism, phenomenology and other prominent frameworks come with distinctive and often unexamined assumptions about what a body is and does. These assumptions have given rise to competing understandings of key concepts, such as embodiment and the biological/material/physical body. In this paper, we propose an comprehensive approach to embodiment in later life that takes the phenomenological and existential significance of ambiguity as its starting point. Taking ambiguity seriously has the potential to overcome unfruitful conceptual distinctions. We draw on phenomenological philosophy, both in our methodological and theoretical choices. Our findings are based on an interview study that inquired into various aspects of older people’s lived experience (<em>n</em>=16; aged above 65). Our concrete theoretical frame builds on the notion of “bodily responsivity” derived from the work of Bernhard Waldenfels. Analysing the empirical material through the lens of bodily responsivity, we identify four distinct ways in which participants responded to the unfolding of ageing: the “bodily I,” “bodily it,” “bodily you” and “bodily we.”</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101284"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142654617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Aging well” in knowledge-intensive service professions in Sweden – The idealization of youth in neoliberal labor markets","authors":"Christian Maravelias","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101281","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101281","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Governments need individuals to be willing and able to work as they age. Yet, studies of older individuals' employability report that labor markets become more rather than less restrictive when it comes to employing older people. The Swedish labor market is a case in point. Recent surveys and governmental reports show that job seekers' employability begins to decrease when they are in their 40s. Through interviews with jobseekers, employer representatives, and human resources and recruitment specialists, the paper examines the employability of older individuals in Sweden. It focuses on knowledge-intensive service occupations, where seniority and age may be considered strengths rather than mere liabilities. It shows that individuals who are proactive about their professional development and strive to ‘age well’ are still excluded from recruitment processes because of their age. Yet, they are not excluded due to ageism in the form of negative prejudice against older job seekers. Rather, they are excluded because employers and recruiters perceive them as being too focused on professional development and lacking the naïve, ‘just-do-it’ mentality of younger job seekers. Furthermore, their professionalism and experience are viewed as factors that make them stand out as potential threats to the managerial hierarchy. Using a governmentality lens, the study contributes to critical research on the intersection of successful aging and employability discourses by addressing a question this research raises but has left unanswered: why are younger job seekers sometimes preferred over older ones, even when employers know they are less skilled, less experienced, and not as proactive or eager to develop professionally? The analysis reveals a rift in the ableism reinforced by the neoliberal discourses on successful aging and employability. While they explicitly emphasize self-governance and proactivity, they implicitly build on individuals' subjection to hierarchical control. The older job seekers match the explicit precepts of the neoliberal discourses yet are excluded because they fail to match the implicit ones. The analysis, therefore, suggests that age is the factor revealing this divide within neoliberal governmentality.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101281"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142654615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social engagement among older women in Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"Yaqi Yuan ,&nbsp;Shun Yuan Yeo ,&nbsp;Kristen Schultz Lee","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101286","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101286","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of people across the globe. Previous studies on the impact of the pandemic in North American contexts have shown that older adults are particularly vulnerable when facing the challenges brought by the pandemic. However, little is known about older women's experiences during the pandemic explicitly. Even less is known about the Asian contexts which are characterized by different beliefs about family, social solidarity, and the role of the government. How did older Singaporean women navigate the restrictions set by the government during the pandemic and what variations in social engagement were observed? To answer these questions<strong>,</strong> we analyze two rounds of in-depth interviews with 40 Singaporean older women aged 55 and above using a modified grounded theory approach. We identify three patterns of social engagement: decreased and weakened, intensified, and continuity. It was generally those who reported strong networks who either maintained or further intensified their social engagements. As for the sources of social connection, respondents drew primarily on family, but also on friends and other community resources, in seeking social engagement during the pandemic. The findings from our study uncover the variety of ways in which older Singaporean women responded to the constraints imposed on social engagement in the context of a pandemic, and the connections between social resources and social engagement.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101286"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142586019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thinking about the future in older age","authors":"Valerie Wright ,&nbsp;Melanie Lovatt","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101282","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101282","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Older age is often conceptualised as a stage of life in which the future is considered to be less relevant than the past. This is reflected in literature that emphasises the importance of the past in later life but overlooks the significance of the future. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analysing narratives that older people write about the future. We do this through secondary analysis of diary entries written by older respondents to the British Mass Observation Project in 1988, in response to a directive about time. The aim of our analysis was to develop conceptual understandings of the relationship between older age and future time. Our thematic analysis identified four main orientations that respondents had towards the future: <em>dreading the future; time running out; taking one day at a time; thinking beyond finitude</em>. Underpinning all of these was a reluctance to contemplate and plan for changes in physical and cognitive health and future care needs, a finding echoed in more recent research. Drawing on critical time perspectives that foreground the fluid, complex and social nature of time, we suggest that reluctance to acknowledge and plan for the future in later life reflects conceptualisations of the future as unpredictable and inseparable from past and present temporalities. This contrasts with more instrumentalist ageing discourses that imply the future can be ‘managed’ from the present. We conclude by calling for a greater repertoire of how we imagine and narrate the future in later life.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101282"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142586343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}