Connected seniors: how older adults in East York exchange social support online and offline

ABSTRACT

How do older adults mobilize social support, with and without digital media? To investigate this, we focus on older adults 65+ residing in the Toronto locality of East York, using 42 interviews lasting about 90 minutes done in 2013–2014. We find that digital media help in mobilizing social support as well as maintaining and strengthening existing relationships with geographically near and distant contacts. This is especially important for those individuals (and their network members) who have limited mobility. Once older adults start using digital media, they become routinely incorporated into their lives, used in conjunction with the telephone to maintain existing relationships but not to develop new ones. Contradicting fears that digital media are inadequate for meaningful relational contact, we found that these older adults considered social support exchanged via digital media to be real support that cannot be dismissed as token. Older adults especially used and valued digital media for companionship. They also used them for coordination, maintaining ties, and casual conversations. Email was used more with friends than relatives; some Skype was used with close family ties. Our research suggests that policy efforts need to emphasize the strengthening of existing networks rather than the establishment of interventions that are outside of older adults’ existing ties. Our findings also show that learning how to master technology is in itself a form of social support that provides opportunities to strengthen the networks of older adults.     

Housing for Older People in Iceland: Apartments and Nursing Homes

The first residential and nursing homes in Iceland were built in the early 1920s, and the first apartments for older people in the early 1970s. Most of the existing housing for older persons was built in the last 30 years. Legislative provisions on housing and particularly on assisted living have not changed significantly since laws relating to the affairs of the elderly were first passed in 1983. While approximately 90% of older people in Iceland own their own home and the primary stated goal of the government is to support independent living, official policy relies on placement in nursing homes. Services and care at home, provided by social and home healthcare services, has not been developed to the same extent as in the other Nordic countries. Clearer guidelines on integrated service housing are needed to reach the government's primary stated goal. Placing more emphasis on delivering services, care, and rehabilitation to people living in the community could shorten individuals’ length of stay in hospitals, delay admission to nursing homes, and better meet the expectations of older people for independent living.     

Gender,the Marital Life Course,and Cardiovascular Disease in Late Midlife

Drawing on 5 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the influence of the marital life course on the prevalence and incidence of cardiovascular disease among 9,434 middle‐aged individuals. Results show that compared to continuously married persons, both men and women with a marital loss have significantly higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease at baseline. Men and women, however, differ in the effects of marital loss on the incidence of cardiovascular disease over the course of the study. Women with a marital loss have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in late midlife compared to continuously married women, whereas marital loss is not associated with men’s risk of cardiovascular disease. Emotional distress and socioeconomic status account for the higher risk of cardiovascular disease among divorced women.     

EXPLAINING COMMUNICATION DISPLACEMENT AND LARGE-SCALE SOCIAL CHANGE IN CORE NETWORKS

Decline in the size and diversity of American's core networks has been tied to the displacement of face-to-face interaction and to lower societal well-being. Comparing core networks in the United States, Norway, and Ukraine, we reject the conclusions that frequent in-person contact predicts individual well-being and that large/diverse networks predict broader societal well-being. Individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and societies with lower levels of overall prosperity have higher rates of in-person contact. Internet use is associated with higher in-person contact for the socioeconomically advantaged but lower rates of in-person contact for the disadvantaged. In-person and ICT-based contact is generally associated with maintaining a larger network, but in societies of lower well-being frequent interaction impedes the ability to maintain a large network. In contrast to the positive relationship between individual SES and network size, societal prosperity has a negative relationship to network size. Findings are discussed in relation to social support, democratic engagement, and the digital divide.     

Life Satisfaction Among Home-Dwelling Older People Who Have Experienced Falls and Have Declined Subjective Health

This study investigated the reported life situations of home-dwelling older people who have experienced falls and have declined subjective health. Mixed method design was used and consisted of a quantitative study comprising questionnaires completed by 434 home-dwelling older people, and a qualitative study consisting of 30 interviews. The findings showed that declined physical function combined with limited health status was associated with falling. Despite limited physical condition, participants experienced well-being and life satisfaction in daily living. Insight obtained from these findings deepens our understanding of fallers and may provide a basis for future research leading to improvements within health care.     

Legislating for Filial Piety: An Indirect Approach to Promoting Family Support and Responsibility for Older People in Korea

Although every culture follows its own indigenous elder care practices, Korea has retained a unique way of supporting elder parents, specifically, and older people in general. When the care of older people in Korea became significantly challenging, it was determined to launch a controversial law to promote the tradition of filial piety. The main content of the law consists of requiring the government to take action to encourage filial piety and to support those adult children who care for their parents. Although this legislation has the potential to promote the practice of filial piety, the nature of the law is largely rhetorical and symbolic rather than practical, and as a result, its workability and efficiency are limited.     

Freedom Works! The Vision and Broken Heart of Jack D. Douglas

It gives me particular pleasure to publish this review of a major but neglected figure in the recent history of symbolic interactionism. I only heard Jack Douglas speak once, when he gave a plenary address to the British Sociological Association annual conference in Lancaster in the mid‐1980s. The audience treated him quite disgracefully on that occasion. Douglas made two subtle points about the need for sociologists to take contemporary research in primate ethology more seriously and to reconsider spontaneous order theories in social science. His listeners assumed that he was talking about the crasser forms of sociobiology and praising the laissez‐faire ideologies of Thatcherism, and booed him off the stage. I declined to renew my membership to the BSA for about ten years after this episode. I only rejoined when I became a department chair and it was important to be engaged with the professional association, whatever my personal views. John Johnson's paper reminds us of Douglas's important and challenging legacy of ideas, and of the support and inspiration that he gave to a whole generation of outstanding scholars. Robert Dingwall Jack Douglas published 26 books and many articles between 1967 and 1989, and by his intellectual charisma influenced a productive cohort of young scholars who have produced over 70 books and 700 articles and chapters since the 1970s. He combined phenomenology, existentialism, and naturalistic field work to create an approach he termed Existential Sociology, also the title of a 1977 anthology. His thinking has undergone significant changes during the course of a long intellectual career. Following his 1992 retirement, the development of the internet and new technologies of communication afforded Jack a “second life” with a transdisciplinary intellectual community outside of the university environment. This paper briefly summarizes a small part of his life and intellectual project.     

A New Genre of Social Protection Policy for Older People: A Critical Analysis of Legislative Development in Nepal

This commentary critically discusses recent legislation promulgated in Nepal to safeguard older people's rights and promote their well-being. Using a human-rights–based framework, the legislation is analyzed for its strengths and weaknesses. Emphasis has also been placed on discussing various aspects overlooked by the legislation, such as changing family structure, relations, and social values; the impact of employment structure and migration; and, importantly, maintaining a desired balance between the roles of the state and of the family in providing social security, support, and care to older people. Efforts have been made to reflect the promulgated law in light of the contemporary developments taking place globally, particularly in regions of Asia. Areas for future policy work are also identified in order to make legislation more inclusive and effective.     

Visual social media and affectivity: the impact of the image of Alan Kurdi and young people’s response to the refugee crisis in Oslo and Sheffield

This article focuses on the reception of the image of Alan Kurdi by a group of young volunteers in Oslo and Sheffield, and their understanding of the subsequent civic and political engagement. Methodologically, the study draws on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with a group of young volunteers who saw the photograph when it went viral on Twitter and who had followed the media coverage and participated in on- and offline activities related to the case. To analyse the views of the research participants on the Alan Kurdi case, I draw on feminist theoretical perspectives on affectivity, theoretical literature relating to news images and iconic photography, and online social movement theories. The study shows that the iconic image of Alan Kurdi offered a way of transforming complex and unsettled aspects of the refugee crisis into something concrete and understandable, contributing to galvanize affective resonance and immediate public response among the involved subjects. The infrastructure of social media, enabling the rapid global circulation of the image, contributed to shaping social assemblages to which connective emotions and common meanings were ascribed.     

WOMEN'S CAREER PATTERNS IN SWEDEN

Although research on and models of career patterns are often implicitly assumed to be of general validity, they are usually coloured by their cultural, ethnic and historical background and by a lack of gender perspective. One of the most critical research gaps concerns changes and transitions in women's careers. The general aim of this paper is to describe career patterns over the life course of women born in the 1950s in Sweden — in terms of shape, level and stability. Data were collected from work histories in the interviews of a sample of Swedish women aged 43 (n?=?109) as part of a longitudinal study. Career patterns were plotted based on life events related to education, family and work. Results revealed relative stability of labour force participation, but not of work hours over the life course. Most of the women worked part time taking care of children for a varying number of years. Continuous full-time work (from 16 to 43) was highly unusual and almost entirely limited to women without children. Nevertheless, career progress in terms of moving to higher career levels was a common feature of the cohort albeit largely restricted to female-dominated occupations. The significance of a generous welfare state supportive for women's career opportunities as well as a highly gender-segregated labour market are discussed. A tentative new model of career patterns, taking account of women's experiences and sensitive to welfare state context, is proposed, as a basis for future research with larger and more diverse samples.

Con frecuencia se asume implícitamente que la investigación y los modelos de los patrones profesionales tienen validez general. Sin embargo, estos estan generalmente matizados por sus antecedentes culturales, étnicos e históricos, y por la ausencia de perspectiva de género. Una de las brechas mas críticas en la investigación concierne a los cambios y transcisiones en la carrera de las mujeres. El objetivo general de este artículo es describir los patrones profesionales en el transcurso de la vida de las mujeres nacidas en Suecia en los años 1950s, en función de forma, nivel y estabilidad. Los datos fueron obtenidos de historias laborales procedentes de entrevistas en una muestra de 109 mujeres suecas de 43 años de edad, como parte de un estudio longitudinal. Los patrones profesionales fueron graficados en base a los eventos de la vida relacionados con educación, familia y trabajo. Los resultados revelaron una relativa estabilidad en la participación en la fuerza laboral, pero no en las horas de trabajo durante la vida. La mayoría de las mujeres trabajaron a tiempo parcial cuidando los hijos por un numero variable de años. El trabajo contínuo a tiempo completo (desde los 16 a los 43 años) resultó sumamente inusual y casi totalmente limitado a las mujeres sin hijos. No obstante, el progreso hacia mejores niveles profesionales resultó un rasgo común de la cohorte, aunque muy restringido a las ocupaciones dominantemente femeninas. Se discuten la significancia de un sistema de asistencia social estatal generoso en el apoyo a las oportunidades profesionales de la mujer y la amplia segregación de género en el mercado laboral. Como base para futuras investigaciones con muestras mayores y diversas, se propone un modelo tentativo de patrones profesionales que toma en cuenta las experiencias de las mujeres y que es sensible al contexto de la asistencia social estatal.     

Building ‘community’ for different stages of life: physical and social infrastructure in master planned communities

As cities around the world struggle to cope with increasing populations, major new master planned housing developments are being undertaken to meet the demand for housing. Such urban developments are influencing workforce, household, and community relations, which in turn drive health and well-being outcomes, and affect social capital and labour market participation. This paper reports findings from the first phase of data collection for the Work, Home and Community Project. Fourteen focus groups were conducted with 68 men and women who live and/or work at newly developed master planned communities in South Australia and Victoria. Findings indicate that familiarity, availability, and the enabling of social bridges contribute to the development of community and social capital in these residential areas. For individuals at different stages of life these factors were facilitated or inhibited by specific physical and social infrastructures in the residential area and the workplace. At a time when concerns are being raised about the ability of people to combine work, home, and community these findings shed some light on the physical and social infrastructures that can enable or constrain the building of healthy communities.     

Young people’s everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement

Everyday political talk is an important democratic activity. Research on young people has focused on the role of talk in political socialization. The overall question in this study is: What encourages or impedes young people to participate in everyday political talk? Politics has been described as a potentially unsafe topic. The study investigates young people’s own experiences of conversations in families, peer groups, and social media. The study applies a social interactional approach and understands political talk as a social achievement, related to norms and the management of self-identities. It is based on a multimethod approach comprising individual interviews, group interviews, and diaries. The group consists of 23 high school students (aged 17–18). The results show that the engagement in political talk is sensitive to the social settings. Norms make political topics expected or best to avoid. The family and peer groups are potentially important context for friendly talk, argumentations, exploration of opinions, and identities. The participants are in general more reluctant to express opinions in social media. The fear of face-threatening responses is one important aspect. The study suggests that political talk is an activity in which young people express, reveal, and carefully manage political self-identities.     

Serial Cohabitation in Young Adulthood: Baby Boomers to Millennials

Age at first marriage in the United States has consistently increased while age at cohabitation has stalled. These trends present an opportunity for serial cohabitation (multiple cohabiting unions). The authors argue that serial cohabitation must be measured among those at risk, who have ended their first cohabiting union. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Family Growth Cycle 6 (2002) and continuous (2006–2013) interview cycles, the authors find that serial cohabitation is increasing among women at risk. Millennials, born 1980 to 1984, had 50% higher rates of cohabiting twice or more after dissolving their first cohabitation. This increase is not driven by the composition of Millennials at risk for serial cohabitation. This work demonstrates the importance of clearly defining who is at risk for serial cohabitation when reporting estimates as well as continuing to examine how the associations between sociodemographic characteristics and serial cohabitation may shift over time.     

Campus politics,student societies and social media

The university campus has often been seen as an important site for the politicization of young people. Recent explanations for this have focused attention upon the role of the student union as a means to enable a ‘critical mass’ of previously isolated individuals to produce social networks of common interest. What is missing from these accounts, however, and what this article seeks to address, is how these factors actually facilitate the development of political norms and the active engagement of many students. Drawing upon qualitative data from three countries we argue that it is the milieu of the smaller student societies that are crucial for facilitating the habitus of the student citizen. They provide the space for creative development and performance of the political self, affiliations to particular fields and access to cultural and social capital. Moreover, we contend that these processes of politicization are increasingly enacted through social media networks that foreground their importance for developing political habitus in the future.     

I Am Woman,Hear Me Tweet! Gender Differences in Twitter Use among Congressional Candidates

This study synthesizes two theoretical literatures to explain gender differences in Twitter usage and effectiveness among US Congressional candidates. The first suggests that candidates in perceived disadvantaged positions, females in this case, innovate to improve their chances of success, and the second, that female politicians often adopt stereotypically masculine behaviors to be successful. On the basis of these theories, we hypothesize and confirm that female candidates are more likely than males to integrate Twitter into their campaigns, but our results are less conclusive regarding a difference in the likelihood that females use negative campaigning tactics via Twitter. Our results also indicate that those females who use Twitter more than their male counterparts tended to do better electorally, but this difference is conditional. Female Republican candidates who tweeted more increased their vote share, but the opposite is true for Democrats. We speculate that this differential effect may be a product of different audiences for social media in each party’s electorate.     

Cambodian youth managing expectations and uncertainties of the life course – a typology of biographical management

Globalising changes in recent decades have produced great impacts on young lives, and youth sociologists have been analysing how young people negotiate change and uncertainty in their lives. This article complements existing research by a case study on Cambodia, where young people have in recent years been charged to deal with drastic social changes but in social conditions different from the better known global North. By drawing on data from a study of young rural–urban migrant labour workers' and university students' life experiences and expectations in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, we systematically compare their sense making, action strategies and future orientation during their transition into working life. We present a theoretically informed but empirically grounded typology that illustrates three major modes of biographical management: entrepreneurial, traditional and situational, which are linked to different perceptions of uncertainty, future perspectives, action strategies, planning modes and resources available through the family, personal capacity and the larger sociocultural context. We conclude with critical remarks on the extent to which the fulfilment of Cambodian young people's hopes for a better life is shaped by broader social conditions and individual circumstances.     

Factors Associated With Multiple‐Partner Fertility Among Fathers

This article uses a sample of 1,731 fathers aged 16 – 45 from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to identify factors associated with multiple‐partner fertility. Almost one third of fathers who reported multiple‐partner fertility did so across a series of nonmarital relationships, and nonmarital‐only multiple‐partner fertility has been increasing across recent cohorts of men. Being older, having a first sexual experience or a first child at a young age, and fathering a child outside of marriage or cohabitation are associated with greater odds of multiple‐partner fertility, whereas having additional children with the first birth mother is associated with reduced odds. Black, Hispanic, and young fathers have especially high odds of experiencing multiple‐partner fertility across a series of nonmarital relationships.