Health-related quality of life in old age: preliminary report on the male perspective

Health-related quality of life is a key element of successful aging. With life expectancy increasing, postmenopausal estrogen/gestagen replacement therapy has been under discussion for some time with the aim of achieving a higher quality of life in old age. For a long time, the relevance of hormonal aging was only discussed with reference to women; however, more recent work deals with concepts that affect both sexes. According to recent studies, numerous symptoms and complaints which may impair quality of life, can be attributed to hormonal changes in old age in both women and men. The majority of age-related complaints, such as a decline in physical performance, decreased sexual activity and a deterioration of general well-being, are strongly reminiscent of the symptoms of classical pituitary disorders in adulthood. Since the early 1990s, scientific studies have also been investigating the influence of hormone 'replacement' in elderly men, using, for example, growth hormones. However, until now there has been no suitable measure for assessing the quality of life specifically in elderly men. In a research project aimed at developing a questionnaire (the VITA? questionnaire), roughly equal numbers of elderly men and women were asked about their subjective health and quality of life. It was found that men assessed their health-related quality of life very positively in a number of different dimensions of the questionnaire. In the present article the individual aspects of the quality of life of men are described and examples of gender-related differences are presented and discussed.     

Improving quality of life in old age: the role of regular physical activity

Physical activity in old age has been shown to produce considerable physiological, psychological and social benefits. However, many older adults take very little exercise. Lack of facilities or meaningful role models together with social and cultural expectations concerning the appropriateness of physical activity for older adults have been cited as reasons for lack of involvement. The development of intergenerational programs is suggested as a potential means of increasing the proportion of older individuals who participate in regular physical exercise.     

The old lady from Ipanema: changing notions of old age in Brazil

This article identifies the main categories, notions, and values associated with aging in articles published in urban Brazilian print media 1967–2002, and uses these categories to trace several historical changes regarding what constitutes “successful” aging in Brazil. The historical changes include the transition of aging from a divine to more worldly concern; from a male to predominantly female preoccupation; from ‘old age’ to ‘third age.’ These transitions are intertwined with new moral hierarchies, and are linked to the medicalization of old age in the late twentieth century.     

Financial literacy and retirement planning in the Netherlands

The complexity of financial decisions that households now face has increased to unprecedented levels. At the same time, households seem to lack the financial knowledge to cope with these decisions, including how to save and invest adequately for retirement. In this paper, we examine the relationship between financial knowledge and retirement planning in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we have designed a module on financial literacy and planning for the De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) Household Survey. We find a strong and positive relationship between financial knowledge and retirement planning; those who are more financially knowledgeable are more likely to plan for retirement. Using information on economics education acquired in school, we show that the nexus of causality goes from financial literacy to planning rather than the other way around.     

Financial literacy and the design of retirement plans

We design and administer a financial literacy test tailored to a specific defined contribution plan. We find that participants show fairly good knowledge of the basic mechanics of the plan, but are unable to differentiate among various investment options. Knowledge is particularly low among women, low income and low education employees. We also find some evidence that personal contributions lead to more knowledge. These results support plan designs that have few investment options and encourage personal contributions.     

Financial literacy education: An opportunity for colleges and sociology

Financial literacy represents the knowledge necessary to manage one's financial affairs in a way that contributes to overall wellbeing, yet financial literacy and financial education are understudied in sociology. While emerging adults have low rates of financial literacy overall, this article focuses on college students due to increasing college access and student loan debt. Based on the limited literature that assesses college financial literacy education, it appears that these types of programs may serve to advance college students' financial knowledge. Additional mechanisms that serve to develop college students' financial literacy include parent socialization, banking experience, and high school financial education programs. However, not everyone has the same access to these resources. Thus, given the magnitude of the US student debt crisis and persistent economic inequalities, college financial literacy education may prove beneficial for all students, particularly those from economically vulnerable backgrounds. This article serves as an invitation to sociologists to consider financial literacy education as both a worthwhile pursuit in application and as a research topic.     

Money illusion,financial literacy and numeracy: Experimental evidence

Money illusion is usually defined as the inability of individuals to correctly account for inflation or deflation when making decisions. Empirical evidence shows that money illusion matters in financial decisions, particularly those made by households. In this article, we analyze money illusion at the individual level within the context of financial choices and study its relationship with numeracy and financial literacy. To do so, we propose an original measure of money illusion via an experimental task. This task consists of a series of choices between a pair of simple bonds whose returns are affected only by inflation (or deflation). We provide a fine-grained measure of money illusion that is correlated with typical measures (questionnaires) of it. Moreover, we show that money illusion depends on the choice context (e.g., inflation or deflation) and participants’ abilities. Individuals with financial knowledge are less sensitive to money illusion than others, while there is no evidence of an impact of numeracy.     

Lessons from history: Surviving old age during The Great Depression in the United States

This paper focuses on 30 couples who received a pension and other services from two private trusts in Detroit, Michigan beginning in 1929 or 1930. Results of the qualitative analysis of case files, which contain notes recorded chronologically for 17 of the couples and then surviving spouses, provide a portrait of older couples' lives prior to a partner's death, circumstances surrounding the death, and changes in the social support systems of widows and widowers until their deaths. Close examination of the experiences of these couples is a reminder of how old age and widowhood were experienced prior to the enactment of public pensions and health insurance in the United States.     

Ageing and exercise: building body capital in old age

Background

Research that provides better understanding of the motivational processes in older age to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle is sought after. We apply theoretical approaches to cultural capital, active and healthy aging health to shed light on the women’s experiences in maintaining physical capabilities through an active lifestyle, and thereby facilitating their own inclusion in society. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore why older home dwelling women over the age of 70 years or more spend time in physical exercise and their experiences about the importance of participating in group exercise for their daily life.This paper reports on a qualitative study based on interviews with 16 older women aged 70 years or more and regularly attending group exercise classes in the community at an established workout center. The data were analyzed the data using an inductive content analysis approach.

Results

Three overreaching and interrelated themes emerged from the interviews: “Building body capital for independence”, “Building body capital to maintain vitality and being in control” and “Building resources for social interaction”. The findings suggest that group exercise is important for building body capital. The group exercise helped the women in building bodily ability to manage everyday life, maintain vitality, being in control, pursue social interaction and live independently. These body resources were important for these older women’s experience of the manageability and meaningfulness of daily life.

Conclusion

This study has provided insights into older women’s understanding and experiences of the challenges of everyday life within a theoretical framework of cultural capital and health. The women acquired cultural health capital, and more specifically body capital, by participating in the group exercise classes. The women’s investment in body capital through regular physical activity created resources which facilitated social participation. Therefore professionals need to be aware of this when performing group exercise.

     

Suffering and generativity: Repairing threats to self in old age

Suffering is a powerful experience that can be difficult to articulate. Suffering differs from pain alone and includes an individual's awareness of a threat to self through death, loss of identity, or uncertainty of the meaningfulness of one's life. In response to this threat, generative acts, especially creative expressions imbued with the self, may act as a means to repair the self in crisis. The case of Mr. A, an 85-year old man in good health, illustrates how various artistic pieces he created – a wooden dog and several poems – helps him to restore a “fading” self. For Mr. A. the idea of “fading away” or becoming weaker and less useful until eventually disappearing is a major source of personal suffering. Through his art, he creates unique, interactive and tangible entities that can outlive his physical body and help him reclaim or repair threats to selfhood.     

Employment situation and life changes for people with disabilities: evidence from Nepal

In this study we attempt to bring attention to the situation of people with disabilities in the developing world by focusing on the labor market of Nepal. Utilizing a unique dataset collected from people with hearing, physical, and visual impairments through questionnaire-based interview methods, we compare across employment based on type of impairments and education levels to identify variation in occupational choices, as well as examining any positive life changes brought by employment. Results indicated that people with hearing, physical or visual impairments often dominated a specific employment sector. Numbers of people with physical, hearing and visual impairments were respectively large in the non-governmental organization sector, restaurants, and local schools. In addition to income, greater social inclusion, respect in the community, more friends, increased confidence, and discovering the new abilities were some of the positive life changes experienced by employees with disabilities.     

Minding the gap: The construction of old age and oldness amongst peers

While ‘oldness’ is a state of being that people in Western cultures agree exists, and ‘old age’ is a category which is readily used in daily discourse and upon which decisions are made in daily life, what old age is and who is old nevertheless remain problematic categories. Social scientists have acknowledged such complexity and sought ways of framing old age that are flexible enough to take the heterogeneity of ageing into account. What has not been considered as closely however are intragenerational dynamics in the construction of old age. Based on ethnographic research on the experiences of ageing and selfhood in the north of England, and using a processual and interactive approach to self-making, I explore here criteria that older people employ to monitor and adjudicate on the manifestation of oldness in their peers, as well as the distinctions they make between ‘normal’ ageing and ‘real’ old age.     

The directionality and age selectivity of the health-migration relation: evidence from sequences of disability and mobility in the United States

Evidence regarding the effects of health status on migration are mixed, with some concluding that there is a positive relation while others conclude a negative relation. This study examines the analytical bases for conflicting findings and proposes a model of the health-migration relation which allows for age selectivity, nonlinearities, interactions, and dynamic effects. Often in migration research we focus on migrant-nonmigrant differentials, which helps us to understand the cross-sectional differences between the 2 groups of persons, but it does little to elucidate the complex process by which nonmigrants become migrants. The sequence of migration and health events, from the US National Health Interview Survey from 1979-1980, show that for the population under age 45, there is little temporal connection between migration and health status changes. 2/3 of the younger population with at least 1 health or migration event migrated only, with health status changes neither preceding nor following the migration. Since the migration and health events for these persons are not associated in time, there is little basis for positing strong relations of either direction for the nonelderly. The age groups for which migration and health events are connected in time are those over age 45, and the temporal proximity becomes even more marked for the elderly. Among the elderly, the migrant-only group constituted only 10% of those with at least 1 event. As expected, for the elderly the dominant relation is health deterioration after migration, the pattern displayed by 65% of the elderly with events in the last 5 years. The elderly are also more likely to be in the Destabilized Migrant category, experiencing health status declines both before and after migration. This is also consistent with the theory that the elderly in poor health at the time of migration will be more likely to be stressed by their migration and experience further deteriorations in health. The conditional probabilities indicate that health status declines are unlikely to precipitate immediate migrations, except for those with pre-existing serious conditions or more severe activity limitations.     

The invisibility of age: gender and class in later life

Sociology almost entirely neglects later life. This contrasts with social policy where elderly people are largely seen as a burden on society and their carers. The article examines three areas of sociological enquiry and suggests reasons for the omission of elderly people. Parallels are drawn with sociology's earlier neglect of women. The feminist agenda has largely excluded the concerns of elderly women and at times has contributed to the pathological image of elderly people as burdens to be shouldered by their daughters. We argue that sociological theories would be enriched by incorporating the experiences of elderly people within their theoretical net.     

Vulnerability in old age: The issue of dependency in American society

The American focus on the importance of self-sufficiency and independence stands in contrast to the economic trends of recent decades that have led to an increased number of adults standing outside the productive core of economic activity. This “burden of dependency” has been manufactured by public policies designed to reconstitute the labor force and redistribute the burden of unemployment largely through the growth in retirement. Recently the success of income maintenance programs developed to improve the financial accessibility of retirement for older workers has begun to undercut the legitimacy of their status as dependents. This article examines that role of dependency, and argues that the social processes that produce dependency among our elders are not substantively different from the processes that affect younger age groups. Consequently the questions of distributive justice that are involved in the dependency of the elderly are questions that relate to members of all age groups who occupy positions of disadvantage in the economic structure.     

Economic,Financial and Geopolitical Governance: USA,European Union and China

The paper examines the policies, choices, structural reforms, regulatory rules, corporate and public administration matching the world standards, openness, innovation, competitiveness, fulfillment of multilateral obligations, integration and regional approach achievements and international relations conditionality in the “Global Governance and Geopolitics” of the main economic, financial and policy issues, with special focus on the new regional approaches pursued by America, the European Union and Asia and the role of the emerging and transition countries. After the US Dollar, now the Eurozone is under pressure and the main Asian countries fear a contagion effect. While somebody proposes a slow devaluation of the Euro in order to soften the public deficits of the group of most exposed countries and restore more competitiveness to the real economy, political leaders are thinking to adopt indirectly the Euro two speeds operative monetary strategy, through the introduction of the majority vote, instead of the full Members consensus, for the most important decisions at the ECB in Frankfurt. Aside these monetary and institutional measures, the binding of the single national fiscal policy to more strict EU parameters of compatibility with the Eurozone sustainability appear unavoidable. This paper represents the background of my lecture given on November 4 at the Beijing Forum 2011 “The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All: Tradition and Modernity, Transition and Transformation” () at the PEK University.     

Changes in age identity: Self perceptions in middle and late life

Sixty-seven women and 34 men, aged 41 to 96, ranging from blue collar workers to professionals, were interviewed about changes that led to their feeling older, and to note special events or birthdays that held particular significance. Four themes were used in the analysis to describe the ways respondents perceived their own aging: the comparative self, reflected self, retrospective self, and mature self. The resulting framework, relying heavily on symbolic interactionist theory, was useful for the entire age range of six decades, despite the fact that age identity is usually studied over attenuated age ranges.