Green grey hairs: A life course perspective on environmental engagement

ABSTRACT

Older adults provide a long view of understanding environmental engagement from their early beginnings to their current community activities. This study draws on interviews with self-described environmentalists and follows a life course analysis that employs social work values and practice skills as they work towards environmental justice in their Midwestern communities. We conclude that the older adults of this second generation of environmentalists offer valuable lessons for social workers with regard to environmental justice, while at the same time contributing insights into older adult volunteering and addressing the challenge of a generational gap in participation in their community organizations.     

Productive engagement among older Americans: prevalence, patterns, and implications for public policy

This study estimates the prevalence of productive engagement among adults aged 60 and over residing in the United States over a nine-year period. We analyze three waves of data from the Americans' Changing Lives Study, which allows the findings to describe the non-institutionalized older American population. Focusing upon five activities--formal paid employment, irregular paid work, unpaid volunteerism, caregiving, and informal assistance to others--we identify changes in the engagement rates, examine the extent to which engagement occurs through single or multiple concurrent activities, and document intra-individual patterns of engagement within and across forms of productive activity, including the continuity, initiation, and cessation of involvement. The findings reveal that late-life productive engagement is widespread, with the majority of older individuals involved in multiple forms of activity concurrently. Non-market-based activities such as caregiving, informal assistance, and volunteering are most prevalent. Initiation and cessation of activities are common and yield more complex patterns and lower rates of non-participation than are revealed in cross-sectional analyses. Time spent in productive engagement is highly variable and exhibits an overall decline across time. We conclude by highlighting policy strategies to increase the availability and quality of opportunities for productive engagement and promote planning for engagement in late life.     

Productive Engagement Among Older Americans: Prevalence,Patterns, and Implications for Public Policy

This study estimates the prevalence of productive engagement among adults aged 60 and over residing in the United States over a nine-year period. We analyze three waves of data from the Americans' Changing Lives Study, which allows the findings to describe the non-institutionalized older American population. Focusing upon five activities—formal paid employment, irregular paid work, unpaid volunteerism, caregiving, and informal assistance to others—we identify changes in the engagement rates, examine the extent to which engagement occurs through single or multiple concurrent activities, and document intra-individual patterns of engagement within and across forms of productive activity, including the continuity, initiation, and cessation of involvement. The findings reveal that late-life productive engagement is widespread, with the majority of older individuals involved in multiple forms of activity concurrently. Non–market-based activities such as caregiving, informal assistance, and volunteering are most prevalent. Initiation and cessation of activities are common and yield more complex patterns and lower rates of non-participation than are revealed in cross-sectional analyses. Time spent in productive engagement is highly variable and exhibits an overall decline across time. We conclude by highlighting policy strategies to increase the availability and quality of opportunities for productive engagement and promote planning for engagement in late life.     

Graduate Social Work Students' Interest in Working with Older Adults

This study examined Master's in Social Work students' (N = 304) interest in working with older adults following the use of case studies to infuse aging content into the foundation social work curriculum. Faculty members were provided with extensive materials to support their use of the cases with aging content in class. Compared to an earlier study, students were significantly more interested in working with older adults after they were exposed to the cases. Factors that predicted students' interest include age and attitude towards aging, specifically seeing older adults as having vitality. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Schizophrenia in older adults

Although the number of people older than 55 with schizophrenia is expected to double during the next 20 years, the research data on older adults with schizophrenia are limited. This appears to be because until the middle of the 20th century, it was assumed that mental illness in older adults was a part of the aging process and because older adults are often excluded from research investigations. Nursing research is needed to explore how people with schizophrenia learn to manage their problems as they age, as well as how those who are first diagnosed with schizophrenia in later life adapt to their illness. Mental health nurses need to be cautious in assigning premature labels to older adults with mental illness that may lead to unsubstantiated assumptions about levels of disability. Instead, nurses should realize individual potential regarding undiscovered strengths and should attempt to create interventions that recognize and foster personal development for older adults with schizophrenia.     

“In the good old days”: Insidious nostalgia and the constitution of old age identity

In this paper older people are studied through qualitative in-depth interviews regarding the constitution of identity. This is based on their participation in specific projects where they take part in schoolwork. The point of departure is that these more or less organised projects provide older people with a physical as well as a social space in which such a constitution can take place. Specific attention is not only directed toward the productive use of nostalgia, but also at the rhetorical use of already established subject positions drawn from the fields of production and reproduction, and from discourses on productive ageing and participation. The intersection of these discourses was not only found to be normative and excluding, but also liberating and a necessity.     

Sick leave -- Cushion or entitlement? A study of age cohorts' attitudes and practices in two Australian workplaces

Stereotypes of older people suggest that they may experience more sickness and injury therefore may not be as productive as younger employees. The present paper attempts to test these stereotypes and reports research into patterns of sick leave in different age cohorts and attitudes towards the use of sick leave. The research was carried out at two case study sites. Managers were interviewed and focus groups were held with workers. A complex pattern was found, suggesting structural issues such as sick leave entitlements, workplace organisation, and flexible work patterns interacted with managers' and workers' attitudes, age, gender and family responsibilities. Flexible workplace hours, and part payment for unused sick leave and insecurity of employment appeared as important factors in reducing absenteeism. The most striking finding was that older workers past pensionable age took the least sick leave. Older workers were careful to conserve sick leave as a 'cushion' for serious illness. Workplace pressures especially those resulting from the failure of management to replace absent workers resulted in work pressure on peers and thus reluctance of workers to take leave.     

Challenges to Aging in Place: Understanding Home Maintenance Difficulties

Age-related declines in capabilities may compromise older adults’ ability to maintain their homes, threatening successful aging in place. Structured interviews were conducted with 44 independently living older adults (mean age = 76.1, standard deviation = 4.7) to discuss difficult home maintenance tasks and how they managed those tasks. Solutions to managing difficulties were categorized as person-related or environment-related. The majority (85%) of responses were person-related solutions. An understanding of the specific challenges that older adults face in maintaining their homes can guide redesign efforts and interventions to effectively support older adults’ desire to age in place.     

Retirement and Productive Activity in Later Life

It is commonly believed that as people age and leave the labor force, they disengage from productive activity and become dependent. While consistent with the conventional economic view of what constitutes productive activity, this belief is inconsistent with a more contemporary view that unpaid work (domestic, volunteer, and caring work) is equally economically valuable (i.e., productive). We investigate differences in how people allocate time among productive and other activities pre- and post-retirement. Results indicate that people remain engaged in productive activities even as they move out of the labor force, substituting unpaid for paid work. Only respondents who have exceeded their normal life expectancy greatly reduce their productive activity. Evidence suggests a need to revisit assumptions underlying policy debate on population aging.

Productive aging: an overview of the literature

"Productive aging" describes an array of activities through which older people contribute to society. Both the extent of current productive activities among older people and the barriers to more extensive productive activity are reviewed. If certain adjustments can be made for their special needs, older people have the potential to make substantial contributions. However, a variety of prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory practices continue to limit the opportunities of older people to make productive contributions, particularly in workplace settings. Interventions are needed to strengthen opportunities for retraining, employment, and volunteering for older people. At the same time, programs and policies to facilitate the productive participation of older people cannot easily correct for the adverse effects of a lifetime of racial or gender discrimination.     

Older lesbians' experiences with home care: Varying levels of disclosure and discrimination

ABSTRACT

There is considerable evidence that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) older adults have experienced barriers to health care access and have profound fears about how they will be treated in the long-term care system, but the specific experiences of older lesbians have received less attention. Most older adults needing long-term services and supports (LTSS) prefer to remain at home, and this is true for lesbians as well. This article reports on a national, qualitative study of the experiences of 20 older lesbians (age 65 and older) with home care workers. The experiences of six informal partner caregivers with home care services are also included. Emergent themes regarding level of disclosure, experiences with homophobia, evaluation of care received, and thoughts about ideal LTSS are described. Most study participants did not disclose their sexual orientation to their home care workers. A significant minority experienced homophobia, but nearly all ultimately found workers who provided good care with which they were comfortable. Their visions of ideal LTSS included greater affordability and particular qualities that were important for home care workers to possess, such as competence, caring and acceptance. Practice and policy implications are outlined including careful recruitment, training and supervision of home care workers to foster lesbian-sensitive care, but also improved wages and work conditions in order to maintain a quality home care workforce.     

Caregiving and Volunteering Among Older People in Sweden—Prevalence and Profiles

This study examines the role of older people in Swedish society by exploring the prevalence of their informal caregiving and volunteering and by analyzing the profiles of these contributors of unpaid work. Data were collected by means of telephone interviews in a Swedish representative survey conducted in 2005. Our analysis reveals three distinct profiles of people involved in unpaid activities. One of these consists of those involved both in informal helpgiving and volunteering, a group that has been labeled “super helpers” or “doers” in earlier research. It is important for social policy planners to recognize these groups of older people and better understand the dynamics of their unpaid work in order to ascertain whether they might need support as providers and to enhance their well-being. There does not seem to be any simple contradiction between the parallel existence of a universal welfare model of the Swedish kind and an extensive civil society in which older people play important roles as active citizens.     

Productive Aging:

"Productive aging" describes an array of activities through which older people contribute to society. Both the extent of current productive activities among older people and the barriers to more extensive productive activity are reviewed. If certain adjustment can be made for their special needs, older people have the potential to make substantial contributions. However, a variety of prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory practices continue to limit the opportunity of older people to make productive contributions, particularly in workplace settings. Interventions are needed to strengthen opportunities for training, employment, and volunteering for older people. At the same time, program and policies to facilitate the productive participations of older people cannot easily correct the adverse effect of a lifetime of racial or gender discrimination.     

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.     

Challenges to Aging in Place: Understanding Home Maintenance Difficulties

Age-related declines in capabilities may compromise older adults' ability to maintain their homes thus threatening successful aging in place. Structured interviews were conducted with forty-four independently living older adults (M(age) = 76.1, SD = 4.7) to discuss difficult home maintenance tasks and how they managed those tasks. Solutions to managing difficulties were categorized as person-related or environment-related. The majority (85%) of responses were person-related solutions. An understanding of the specific challenges that older adults face in maintaining their homes can guide redesign efforts and interventions to effectively support older adults' desire to age in place.     

Geographic distance and intergenerational relationships in Chinese migrant families

ABSTRACT

This study examines the effect of adult Chinese migrants’ geographic distance from home on their intergenerational relationships with parents who remain behind. We compared monetary and family care support as well as emotional relationships among four parent-child groups: older adults and international migrant children, older adults and internal migrant children (who migrated to other cities in China), older adults and coresiding children, and older adults and local children (living in the same city as their parents). Data were derived from 332 older adults in Beijing, China, with at least one child who migrated to another country or city. Results from chi-square tests, anaylsis of variance (ANOVA) tests, and regression analyses indicate that international and internal migrant children maintain similar intergenerational relationships with their parents, and that both of those groups are less likely than coresiding and local children to have family care exchanges and emotionally close relationships with their parents. The results may help professionals develop supportive services and policies for older adults in migrant families.     

WORKING CARERS OF OLDER ADULTS

Juggling work and care presents particular challenges to carers and employers. Employers are increasingly under pressure, both from within organizations and from recent government legislation and policy, to develop family-friendly policies to support informal carers in the workplace. Yet existing ‘family-friendly’ schemes and services are still primarily designed for working parents of young children and rarely address the needs of employees who care for older or disabled adults. This paper reports on a study which investigated how working carers and managers in two public sector organizations — a Social Services Department (SSD) and a National Health Service (NHS) Trust — combined their work and caring responsibilities. A multi-method approach was adopted consisting of five phases. First, a profile of the two organizations was established, followed by a short screening questionnaire to all employees to identify who was caring for an older adult over the age of 60. Third, a lengthier postal survey was sent to the 365 carers who had indicated a willingness to participate further. In the fourth and fifth phases, carers and managers were interviewed in depth about their experiences. This paper reports briefly on the survey, but then concentrates in particular on what was said in the interviews about what helps and hinders working carers of older adults. Despite the existence of policies to support carers, our findings suggest that these were far less important than informal support from colleagues and a sympathetic manager in the workplace. Commuting distance between work, home and the older person also posed difficulties for carers, along with inflexible schedules and work overload. Employers are urged to explore these issues further if they are serious about recruiting and retaining employees, and developing the work – life balance agenda to meet the needs of those caring for older and disabled adults.     

Seniors and technology, ergonomic needs and design considerations

This work is based on the ergonomic approach and the principles of universal design, with the aim of establishing the cognitive design features that interfaces must comply, for older adults achieve a good performance during their interaction with technological aids. Describes the analysis of exploratory experiences with a group of 17 older adults was aimed first to establish the main barriers to implementation that arise during these activities, and secondly to set the variables to be addressed and the procedure required to develop depth study, where the relationship establish between the quality of the stimuli and the level of performance achieved in the implementation of older adults with interfaces, observing each of the cognitive functions that promote independence, attention, motivation, memory these processes. The study in depth, looking for describe gaps and mismatches encountered during execution, which hamper the harmonious interaction processes through participatory methodological approach that allows to specify requirements for the creation of stimulating interfaces for cognitive skills and committed with the levels of autonomy of the elderly.     

Utilizing volunteer research assistants in epidemiologic studies

Utilizing volunteers in research-assistant roles can provide a new model for extending research dollars in epidemiologic studies of the elderly. This is increasingly important with a rapidly growing older population suffering from an increasing prevalence of disability, disease, and the related medical costs. During a two-year cross-sectional study of factors that predict health aging conducted by the Buck Center for Research in Aging in Marin County, California, 82 volunteers were recruited and trained to fill roles often held by paid research assistants. The key activities of telephone screening, interviewing, coding, and data entry were successfully completed by trained volunteers following standards and within a time frame comparable to similar studies. Volunteer research assistants contributed approximately 13,600 hours that resulted in a savings in personnel costs of over $100,000. Many of the people recruited and trained as volunteer research assistants were healthy older adults and retired workers. The project utilized their transferable skills and talents in an interesting and productive capacity.     

A photovoice study of older adults' conceptualizations of risk

Risk is a multifaceted and complex concept that mediates quality of life through the balance between risk taking and risk avoidance. Society expects older adults to identify and manage their personal risks yet little is known about the meaning of risk in their daily lives and how they balance the tensions between taking and avoiding risks. Therefore the purpose of this study was to explore how older adults construe risk. A qualitative exploratory study that incorporated photovoice methodology was used. Seventeen older adults, over a weeklong period, took pictures and kept a log of the places, spaces, events, activities, or situations that best represented risk. Subsequently, they participated in a follow-up individual interview. Older adults viewed risk both positively and negatively, judging the saliency of a risk according to criteria that related both to the risk itself and to personal characteristics. Although risk was avoided in specific situations, risk taking was participants' primary approach to risk, which assumed three forms: adaptive, opportunistic, and/or unjustifiable. Contrary to societal views, older adults view risk as constructive and personally relevant, and as something to be taken and need to be supported in risk taking rather than risk avoidance.