Search

This paper explores how older people's reluctance to engage in social media's more vernacular practices, such as selfie-taking and sharing, can be attributed to specific social barriers to online inclusion and participation. Drawing on empirical research conducted during social media-oriented digital literacy workshops with older people, we explore how 'reluctant' participation was linked to perceptions of social media cultures that did not match older peoples' values, interests or needs. Despite their desire to make better use of digital communication tools, platform demands for visual self-presentation were difficult because participants (a) lacked social context to negotiate the modes of intimacy and self-expression common to social media use, and therefore (b) felt they lacked the cultural competency to manage or integrate the more complex social boundaries associated with social media interaction. These observations, we argue, illustrate that digital inclusion and participation are not just about access, use or even skills, but are also entangled with structural modes of exclusion associated with social and generational norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how positive social media representations of aging Black female bodies problematize existing notions of aging as an almost uniformly negative phenomenon. Using the social media platform Tumblr, this study reveals that the framing of age, race, and gender is both complex and nuanced. Images which challenge deeply set historical notions of female beauty include those of celebrities, noncelebrities and comparisons between aging Black women and historically standardized representations of physical attractiveness. Findings illustrate that managing impressions vis-à-vis social media is a complex, sometimes messy performance in which images both challenge and substantiate problematic assumptions. Some images that framed Black women positively but did so at the expense of other women. This paper adds to the body of work that explores how social media is used as a vehicle for counter narrative messaging. These findings offer additional insight into how impression management theory is used to analyze social media content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Young people at the intersection of child welfare and immigration face significant challenges to successfully transitioning to adulthood and independence from foster care. This transition is made even more difficult in light of current immigration policies and an anti-immigrant political climate. This paper highlights systemic barriers for youth who are immigrants and aging out of foster care and provides recommendations for states and child welfare systems to better meet the needs of this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to re-position the perceptions and contributions of older people in contemporary Australian society. The world is undergoing a profound demographic shift, with almost every nation state experiencing population ageing on a scale that is unprecedented. This means that we have to search for new models by which to grow old and challenge stereotypes that there is only one acceptable way of doing so. The dominant view of adult ageing has recently changed from one based on dependency to one based on economic contribution. However if we are to successfully move to a new cultural environment – one that accepts age diversity and eschews age prejudice – we must consider a wide range of ways in which older adults can make a contribution. It would not be too much to say that we currently experience a poverty of meaning in our understanding of adult ageing. To address this poverty of meaning this paper draws on a series of social, cultural and historical ideas from which alternative understandings of ageing and later life are identified and discussed. Scholarly articles and texts from a range of disciplines form the basis of analysis, presenting a rich array of options for older adults. The discussion suggests that multiple sources of meaning are available to older adults, many of which counter dominant and acceptable ways of growing old in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As women age, their sexual desirability is likely to diverge from what is presented as most coveted in American society: youthful, slim but curvy, firm, and fit. Media rarely feature actresses over the age of 50 as leading characters and when they do, they are usually relegated to caretaker or partner roles and they usually conform to gender traditional stereotypes. However, more recently, there have been a few television programs that focus specifically on older women’s sexualities and feature plotlines that center on their desire and desirability. The premise of the program Hot in Cleveland is that desirability is in the eye of the beholder. Using a comedic format, the show highlights the tensions between media and celebrity fueled standards for desirability and “real life” desirability. In this paper, based on a close analysis of five seasons of Hot in Cleveland, we explore these competing messages about midlife and older women’s appearance and sexualities and the way comic framing both challenges and reinforces dominant narratives of aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The old are rarely the focus of research in archaeology. Older skeletonized bodies are hard to give a chronological age, and this seems to justify the lack of research focus. In this paper I argue that the old are not naturally invisible to archaeologists, but have been made so by a focus on chronology at the expense of the bodily and by our ambivalence towards the ageing process. I suggest that, rather than applying numbers to skeletons, we should focus our research on understanding the ageing of the body itself in archaeological contexts, and the relationships between processes of continuity and processes of decline. This is achieved through analysis of four aspects of embodied ageing: changes in appearance; in bodily function; in age-related disease; and in skill. The ageing body is not invisible: it is present, variable and a rich resource for future archaeological analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we suggest that older adults undergo a misalignment between societal age norms and personal lived experience, and attempt reconciliation through discursive strategies: They rewrite how they frame chronological age as well as their subjective relations to it. Using a sample of 4041 midlife and older adults from the 2004–2006 wave of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS II), we explore associations of age and gender with subjective age and at what age respondents felt people enter later life. Our results confirm that as men and women age, they push up the age at which they think people enter later life, and slow down subjective aging (there is a growing gap between subjective and chronological age). Relations between a person's age and at what age they think people enter later life were stronger for men than for women. For every year they get older get older, men push up when they think people enter later life by 0.24 years, women by 0.16 years. Age norms surrounding the transition to later life may be more prominent for men than for women, and the difference in their tendencies to push up when they mark entry into later life may be a reflection of this greater prominence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the focus of ageing in place policy is concerned with the provision of support to enable older people to age in the community in residences adapted to their needs. There has been little examination of why older people make choices to age in particular places in later life. In this paper, we drew on 143 interviews with older people in New Zealand to examine the narratives older people use to describe their housing preferences in later life. Older people drew upon personal and public narratives to story housing in later life, and construct four identifiable identities: ‘practical planner’, ‘rugged pioneer’, ‘where I belong’ and ‘rooted in place’. This analysis demonstrates that some older people do narrate decisions to age in ‘sensible’ places with good access to services and have clear plans for change as their physical health declines. Other older people live proudly in unsuitable places and do not wish for support to move or accommodations made to their housing. These older people draw upon narratives of place as foundational to their identity, of relationships with people both living and dead as social relationships that bolster their identity and of housing as part of situated lifelong narratives. Both the situation of their home and the condition of the home provide the backdrop to alternative narrative identities that require them to remain in housing because of, or irrespective of, its unsuitability. To understand the limitations and the possibilities of ageing in place, we need to identify the multiple narratives that structure the lives of older people. By doing so, we can support ageing in place processes that do not disrupt the strong identities that have been developed in and through housing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Healthy aging is one of the most important social issues. In this paper, we propose a method for abnormal activity detection without any manual labeling of the training samples. By leveraging the Field of View (FOV) modulation, the spatio-temporal characteristic of human activity is encoded into low-dimension data stream generated by the ceiling-mounted Pyroelectric Infrared (PIR) sensors. The similarity between normal training samples are measured based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of each pair of them. The natural clustering of normal activities is discovered through a self-tuning spectral clustering algorithm with unsupervised model selection on the eigenvectors of a modified similarity matrix. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are employed to model each cluster of normal activities and form feature vectors. One-Class Support Vector Machines (OSVMs) are used to profile the normal activities and detect abnormal activities. To validate the efficacy of our method, we conducted experiments in real indoor environments. The encouraging results show that our method is able to detect abnormal activities given only the normal training samples, which aims to avoid the laborious and inconsistent data labeling process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elderly population presents a market of particular relevance to a large number of industries for its high purchasing power, comparatively higher than younger groups. Specifically, the tourism sector is emerging as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the aging process as a result of changes in the lifestyle of the population currently, more leisure-oriented than previous generations. However, the tourist companies are facing difficulties in understanding these consumers, whose behavior is different as mentioned, from that of older people in the past. So, this paper aims to identify the main characteristics of the senior consumers for the tourism industry, through three main objectives. The first one is focused on the tendency to travel; the second one is based on the motivation, pull and push factors; and finally, the travel characteristics of Spanish seniors. Research findings showed that there are differences between travelers and non-travelers, depending on sociodemographic characteristics and previous travel experience, where the main reasons provided for not travelling included economic status and health. The literature about senior tourism is discussed in light of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health norms have changed over the past three decades, imposing more responsibility for health onto the individual. There are gendered implications of these changes which, when combined with increasing anti-aging pressures, have the potential to intensify the disciplinary relationship women have with their bodies. This paper, based upon interviews with 14 women, examines the impact of dominant health and anti-aging discourses on women's body practices, including exercise, makeup, clothing and diet, and ongoing construction of gendered subjectivity. Findings suggest that the women in this study are motivated to do particular body practices because of their concern with having a healthy and youthful ‘looking’ body. The women's stories reveal that anti-aging and health discourses function to reinforce normative bodily demands of femininity and consequently to intensify disciplinary control of their bodies. While the pressure to fight the appearance of aging is not new, the increasing association of aging with ill health, even illness, in conjunction with the promotion of health has implications for women's relationship with their bodies and sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we argue that quantitative survey-based social research essentializes age, through specific rhetorical tools. We outline the device of ‘socio-demographic variables’ and we discuss its argumentative functions, looking at scientific survey-based analyses of adult scientific literacy, in the Public Understanding of Science research field. ‘Socio-demographics’ are virtually omnipresent in survey literature: they are, as a rule, used and discussed as bundles of independent variables, requiring little, if any, theoretical and measurement attention. ‘Socio-demographics’ are rhetorically effective through their common-sense richness of meaning and inferential power. We identify their main argumentation functions as ‘structure building’, ‘pacification’, and ‘purification’. Socio-demographics are used to uphold causal vocabularies, supporting the transmutation of the descriptive statistical jargon of ‘effects’ and ‘explained variance’ into ‘explanatory factors’. Age can also be studied statistically as a main variable of interest, through the age–period–cohort (APC) disambiguation technique. While this approach has generated interesting findings, it did not mitigate the reductionism that appears when treating age as a socio-demographic variable. By working with age as a ‘socio-demographic variable’, quantitative researchers convert it (inadvertently) into a quasi-biological feature, symmetrical, as regards analytical treatment, with pathogens in epidemiological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ageing of societies is a unique historical development of mankind. Today, such ageing is recognized as a threat for developed societies. There is fear of increasing inequality in health and in access to health care. Apart from the costs of ageing and care, such fear creates intergenerational conflicts. This paper explores what values are at stake when a society ages. At issue here is the social position of the old citizens and the way in which they are regarded by their fellow citizens. Findings indicate the need to contemplate the consequences of ageing for societies and to discuss the impact these have for the values dominating contemporary post-welfare states. European welfare states were based on a balanced combination of three values: freedom, equality, and solidarity. Because these values are misbalanced now, equal accessibility of care and conditions for social participation are disappearing. Therefore, we shall have to think about new ways in which our societies can reaffirm basic human values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary feminist research is highly preoccupied with dismantling social categories and challenging binaries which have long underpinned social thinking. Surprisingly, such deliberations have left the nexus of age and singlehood resistant to deconstructive analysis. Addressing recent literature on age, feminist theory and singlehood we are concerned with re-evaluating the image of the old maid image alongside the omnipresence of age and ageism in current discourses on singlehood, family life and intimate relations. Drawing on a content based analysis we argue that single women are faced with a triple disfranchisement based on their age, gender and single status. We further argue that the aging process of single women should be viewed as a situated symbolic practice disguised as a natural imperative, and not as it is customarily grasped, as a given biological category. Thus, this paper is set to critically revisit the authority of age and ageist practices by offering a new conceptual lens through which a revised feminist sociology of singlehood and age could be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal ( http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy ). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author. The authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in Sociological Theory, 2008 26:25, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008.00317.x . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]