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Editorial. Comments on the aging of the population and the implications for medical care and health care systems. How the demographic trend will affect health care and society; Specific problems that the U.S. faces which are related to aging; Invitation to authors to submit manuscripts on topics such as disease interventions, dementia, incontinence, diabetes, cancer and others.

In light of the dramatically aging workforces in many industrialized countries, age diversity management will become a major challenge in human resource management. To successfully handle an age-diverse workforce, it is crucial to understand how employees of different ages can be motivated. This paper analyzes age's moderating role in the relationship between situational job characteristics and job satisfaction. To control for the potential influence of the cultural and institutional context, we use data from the USA, Japan and Germany. Findings show that older employees' job satisfaction is driven by different factors than younger employees: older employees put more emphasis on good relationships with colleagues, while income, advancement opportunities, job security and having an interesting job are less important. However, these effects are mostly nation-dependent, which underlines the importance of conducting cross-cultural or cross-national aging research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay compares the spiritual and material terms of aging among black women in the post-emancipation North. It contrasts the public representations of African American women elders and the more prosaic, material work that black women and broader northern free black communities performed in coping with the challenges of aging. Early American biographies of black women elders characterized them as pious exemplars of Christian virtue. They also showed how they used collective practices to cope with aging. Other sources reveal this communal ethos. The records of churches, mutual aid societies, black women authors, and others show how free black communities brought together religious and material resources to support African American women in the aging process. Through this "community of care," black Northerners provided material and spiritual support to an aging population of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative stereotypes not only affect how older people feel about themselves, but also how younger people feel about old age and their prospect of growing old. The research reported in this paper has examined the negative and potentially harmful stereotypes of older people portrayed in magazine advertisements in the United States, as perceived by groups of older and young people. Q-methodology sorts of 40 advertisements with negative images of older people, along with personal interviews, were used to probe older people's and college student's feelings and attitudes about the images. The subjects were placed in four categories: 'moralists', 'objectors', 'ageing moralists' and 'resentfuls'. Regardless of whether stereotypes were used, the older people liked the advertisements that showed them as being clever, vibrant and having a sense of humour. Neither the older people nor the students liked advertisements that ridiculed or poked fun at older people, or presented them as being Out of touch with reality and unattractive. Both groups rated the stereotypes dealing with the real problems associated with ageing as inoffensive. The comparison of the two age groups showed a strong consensus about which images were acceptable and which offensive. [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]

A growing number of countries are developing or reforming pension and health policies in response to population ageing and to enhance the welfare of their citizens. The adoption of different policies by different countries has resulted in several natural experiments. These offer unusual opportunities to examine the effects of varying policies on health and retirement, individual and family behaviour, and well-being. Realizing these opportunities requires harmonized data-collection efforts. An increasing number of countries have agreed to provide data harmonized with the Health and Retirement Study in the United States. This article discusses these data sets, including their key parameters of pension and health status, research designs, samples, and response rates. It also discusses the opportunities they offer for cross-national studies and their implications for policy evaluation and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper joins central concerns in the sociology of work and the sociology of aging. Age differences in work commitment and work values are examined, as well as their work and nonwork determinants, using data from 4,567 American and 3,735 Japanese employees. Our results show that older men are more committed to work than younger men in both Japan and the United States. This pattern also holds for American women, but there are no age differences in work commitment among Japanese women. Moreover, there are greater age differences among the Japanese in the importance placed on good pay. This is consistent with the view that there has been greater cultural change in recent years in Japan than in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine how older people make sense of their capacity to maintain sports performance. Performance maintenance is predominantly examined from a quantitative perspective, with little attention given to how people themselves account for it. We interviewed 44 competitors (23 females, 21 males) from the 2009 Sydney World Masters Games (aged 56–90 years; mean = 72 years). The major themes were: ‘Use it or lose it’ (performance preservation required specific ‘training’ and the continuation of general physical activity); ‘Adapt’/‘modify’ (participants compensated for their decline in speed, strength and endurance so they could continue competing in sport); ‘It's in my genes’ (participants attributed their ‘family history’ and/or innate ‘determination’ to performance maintenance); and ‘I like to push myself’ (participants valued improved performance, pushing their bodies and winning which motivated them to continually train and compete). The findings are discussed within a framework of three key performance maintenance theories: (a) preserved differentiation, (b) selective maintenance and (c) compensation. Although compensation and continued training are effective ways to counter decline in later life, this study extends past research by showing how older athletes tend to combine and/or generalise stable and unstable attributes of performance preservation. In particular, this research highlights the importance individuals and Western society place on self-responsibility for health, competition and performance maintenance, which act as key motivating factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Population aging, in conjunction with social and cultural transformations of the life course, has profound implications for social systems-from large-scale structures to micro-level processes. However, much of sociology remains fairly quiet on issues of age and aging, including the subfield of social psychology that could illuminate the impact of these broader social forces on individual lives. This study examines the scope of research on age, aging, and the life course in the leading social psychological journal in sociology ( Social Psychology Quarterly) and compares it with coverage in the primary social psychology journal in psychology ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) and two sociology journals ( American Sociological Review and Journal of Health and Social Behavior). An analysis of articles published between 1977 and 2006 shows that approximately 7 percent in Social Psychology Quarterly or Journal of Personality and Social Psychology seriously considered age. In contrast, 11 % of articles in American Sociological Review and 25 % in Journal of Health and Social Behavior did so. Across the journals, examinations of age increased over time. However, studies reflect a limited range of methodological and theoretical approaches with few employing qualitative methods or a symbolic interactionist perspective. We discuss several under-explored sites for research on age, aging, and the life course that would enrich social psychological and sociological scholarship more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined American young adults' written accounts of intergenerational communication with a focus on factors that initiate conflict. Analysis of the conflict scenarios in intergenerational relationships revealed seven types of initiating factors. Results also indicated that the type of relationship with older adults was associated with the frequency distribution of five of the seven initiating factors. Specifically, young adults perceived they were criticized and rebuffed by nonfamily elders more frequently than by family elders, whereas young people tended to disagree with and rebuff family elders more than nonfamily elders. Furthermore, young people reported more incidents of illegitimate demand from family elders than from nonfamily elders. Results are discussed with respect to intergenerational communication research and the communication predicament of aging model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the effects of civic engagement on the engaged older adults in the U.S. It discusses disengagement theory, a theory which emerged as the leading perspective on activity in the lives of older individuals. After the proposal of disengagement theory, various studies have revealed that many older individuals prefer to be engaged and that they benefit from engagement. These results have led to the formation of another theories, including continuity theory, activity theory, and the views of successful and productive aging which postulate that engagement is beneficial to the individual and that the loss of valued roles and responsibilities lessen the well-being of older adults.

Ten individuals over the age of 55 were awarded scholarships in order to enroll in an intergenerational service learning course. Through class participation and community service activities, the traditional-age students and senior adult students shared experiences and learned about the processes of aging. A pretest-posttest design using a control group and experimental group (N = 44) was employed in order to assess the effectiveness of this pedagogical method. The results, both quantitative and qualitative, indicate that the course helped to create more realistic views of aging and foster more positive attitudes toward the elderly. Implications of the findings are discussed and include a recommendation for additional intergenerational programs that include senior adults in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the importance attached to intergenerational conflict in empirical studies of political opinion and behavior affecting aging policy. Political status and social imagery; Issue of generational equity; Studies of political preferences among generations; Studies of candidate and party preferences; Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR).

Examines the relationship between social policy and the condition and needs of the elderly population. Social construction of reality; Role of the aging enterprise; Social creation of dependency; Fiscal crisis and restructuring of community care; Problems in the nonprofit sector; Empowerment initiative in social policy and community care; Levels of intervention; Contradictions and problems in community care; Managed care.

Presents a set of photographs of aging women taken in Central Minnesota and Yugoslavia. Ongoing project; Exhibits; Visual characterizations of aging women; Provision of broader impact; Individual and cultural perceptions.

Discusses the concept of `place in aging' and `aging in place'. Physical attachment to place; Social affinity; Personal history; Historical trends; Generational effects; Familiarity and Involvement; Consideration of the role of place in aging; Housing and social policy.

Discusses images of death of an elderly in the home. Factors affecting the increase in home death; Experience of caring for the dying; Caregiver's Role; Home as a refuge; Home death not as a cost-saving measure.

Examines key dimensions of friend and family relationships and predictors of outcomes on each dimension to the aging well in the United States. Dimensions of personal relationship; Implications of friendship in aging well; Structure and processes of family relationships; Relationships as resources for aging well.

The article reports on the demographic changes of older people's population coupled with the technological innovation in the United States. It presents the estimated population of older people in the United States based on the report issued by the National Center for Health Statistics, 2005. High attention was given by researchers and policy makers on the topic of technology and aging due to the important means of maintaining and enhancing older people's quality of life. Several conferences and meetings were held to address this issue including the sponsored workshop of the National Research Council and the National Institute on Aging in 2003.