Search

Accompanying the ageing of contemporary ageing societies is an increase in age associated morbidity, with dementia having an important impact. Mental frailty in later life is a source of fear for many and a major policy concern to all those concerned with health and welfare services. This introduction to the special issue on 'Ageing, dementia and the social mind' situates the selected papers within the context of debates about dementia and its social relations. In particular it draws attention to the importance of the social imaginary of the fourth age and what this means for the issue of personhood, care, social representations of dementia and its social contextualisation. The papers illuminating these themes draw on a variety of disciplines and approaches; from the social sciences to the humanities and from the theoretical to the empirical in order to help orientate future researchers to the complexities of dementia and the social and cultural matrix in which it exists. This paper provides an introduction to the potential for a more extended sociology of dementia; one which could combine the insights from medical sociology with the concerns of social gerontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vignettes are stories generated from a range of sources including previous research findings. They make reference to important factors in the study of perceptions, beliefs and attitudes. Vignettes have primarily been used by psychologists in North America and used in quantitative surveys but more recently they have been used in a small number of qualitative studies. Drawing from a range of studies in the social sciences this paper considers the value of vignettes together with the difficulties associated with the technique. It introduces the technique in a study that explores drug injectors' perceptions of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) risk and safer behaviour inside and outside the prison system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]