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Transfer from a private home to an assisted living facility has been pictured as a major change in an older person's life. Older people themselves tend to perceive the change as something eventual that breaks the bonds and familiarities of previous life. The aim of this article is to shed light on residents’ chances to reach affiliation (as Nussbaum defines it) in their new living surroundings, and thus adjust to that social environment. Based on ethnographical data gathered in a Finnish sheltered home in 2013–14, we studied residents’ affiliations through ruptures, namely residents’ perceived social isolation. Social isolation was found to be connected with two separate social worlds: the one inside the facility and the one outside. Social isolation resulted from different factors connected to the quality of social interaction with co-residents and the staff, daily routines of the institution and residents’ personal life histories. Also, residents’ older friends seemed to avoid visiting care facilities which caused perceived social isolation. This article deepens the insights into the perceived social isolation of assisted living and thus helps care providers to create new strategies to enable due affiliation for their residents.

Culturally, institutional care has been seen to strip older people of their status as full adult members of society and turn them into ‘have-nots’ in terms of agency. The substantial emphasis in gerontology of measuring the activity and functional ability of the elderly has unintentionally fostered these stereotypes, as have traditional definitions of agency that emphasise individuals’ choices and capacities. The aim of this paper is to discover what kind of opportunities to feel agentic exist for people who have reduced functional abilities and therefore reside in assisted living. In this paper, agency is approached empirically from the viewpoint of Finnish sheltered housing residents. The data were gathered using participant observation and thematic interviews. This study suggests that even people with substantial declines in their functional abilities may feel more or less agentic depending on their functional and material surroundings and the support they receive from the staff, relatives and other residents. The perception that residents’ agency in assisted living cannot be reduced to measurable activity has methodological implications for gerontological research on agency. Care providers can utilise our findings in reasserting their residents’ quality of life.

Autonomy is a pervasive concept in Western lifestyles today. However, people in the fourth age are assumed not to be autonomous but dependent on other people. The data of this study consisted of interviews with Finnish community-dwelling 90–91-year-old people. The study aim was to examine how these people see their own autonomy in their everyday lives. The analysis was based on membership categorisation analysis. Our respondents considered their autonomy through three distinct themes. Functional ability was considered in terms of being physically capable of managing daily tasks. Independence in decision making was based on material and financial self-sufficiency and on the respondents' supposition that they were capable of making decisions due to an absence of memory disorders. Additionally, autonomy was considered as contesting norms of age-appropriateness. Among respondents, chronological age seemed to have been replaced by functional and cognitive ability as a definer of categorisations; age-others became ability-others. Our study revealed that the perceptions of autonomy also included gendered features as they were linked with differing gendered ideals, roles and life domains of women and men. The results highlight the internal diversity among the oldest old and challenge the third/fourth age division. Instead, they suggest the existence of a certain ‘grey area’ within old age, and urge an analysis on the subtle meaning making involved in older people's constructions of age-categorisations.