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Drawing on forty-seven ethnographic interviews, this article explores how “straight-edgers” (sXers)—participants in the hardcore music scene who abstain from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and promiscuous sex—construct and evaluate authenticity. While research on music subcultures documents how authenticity hinges on factors such as gender and race and how it may change over time, sXers place special importance on age, in particular, the legal drinking age of twenty-one. Interviews reveal that, depending on their distance from the legal drinking age, sXers differentially construct authenticity by relying on their selective use of the past, present, and future. Rather than simply serving as one more dimension of authenticity, however, the issue of age and the debates surrounding it serve as an entry point to understanding the temporality of authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To understand how elderly patients think about and approach future illness and the end of life., Design: Qualitative study conducted 1997-9., Setting: Physician housecall programme affiliated to US university., Participants: 20 chronically ill housebound patients aged over 75 years who could participate in an interview. Participants identified through purposive and random sampling., Main Outcome Measures: In-depth semistructured interviews lasting one to two hours., Results: Sixteen people said that they did not think about the future or did not in general plan for the future. Nineteen were particularly reluctant to think about, discuss, or plan for serious future illness. Instead they described a "one day at a time," "what is to be will be" approach to life, preferring to "cross that bridge" when they got to it. Participants considered end of life matters to be in the hands of God, though 13 participants had made wills and 19 had funeral plans. Although some had completed advance directives, these were not well understood and were intended for use only when death was near and certain., Conclusions: The elderly people interviewed for this study were resistant to planning in advance for the hypothetical future, particularly for serious illness when death is possible but not certain.