Concerns over growing numbers and proportions of older people in industrialised societies have prompted interest in the development of cheaper ways of providing long-term care for older people. While debate in the UK is currently focused on the costs of residential and nursing care, other European and Nordic countries have introduced schemes designed to encourage or sustain the provision of ‘social’ care by family members, friends and ‘volunteers’, on the assumption that this can be provided at lower net public expense than either residential care or formally-organised domiciliary services.

Drawing on material from a detailed comparative study, this paper describes four different models on which such payments are currently based. These models are discussed and evaluated, taking into account factors which include the eligibility criteria for payments; maximising the autonomy of older people and family care-givers; and the relationships between financial payments and access to services.

These models locate systems of payment within the broader context of financial and service support designed to help frail older people and those who support them. They therefore highlight the importance of considering both financial support and services in comparative studies of social welfare provision. However, further evaluation and policy development is hindered by the lack of evaluation of different models of paying for care and a lack of evidence about the experiences of older people and care-givers.

We report the findings of a survey of 104 Asian older people in Bradford. For a high proportion, their condition was characterised by poverty, limited entitlements, inadequate housing, low levels of knowledge of health and social services, and problems of access to welfare benefits, health and social care. The situation of women was of particular concern. The study also highlights the problems of divided families, caused by restrictive immigration rules, resulting in many elderly people having no family support in this country.

This descriptive study looks at what 372 Australian and 191 Israeli women, aged 18–93, consider to be the most and least important sources of meaning in their lives. The Sources of Meaning Profile (SOMP), an instrument measuring current meaning, gave rise to two major observations. First, there are considerable similarities in attributions of meaning within age-differentiated national samples. Secondly, there are similarities in meaning perceptions between age-matched groups across national samples. Participation in personal relationships was the important source of meaning in all age categories, in Israel and Australia. Leaving a legacy for the next generation, participation in religious activities, and taking part in pleasurable (hedonistic) activities were among the least important sources of meaning cited by both samples. Meaning variables related to the realisation of individual potential (e.g. personal growth, creativity, etc.), were the most differentiating for the Australian age groups, while variables related to altruism, humanistic, social and cultural concerns were the most differentiating for the Israeli women. Theoretical implications are discussed.

This article addresses the subject of the role of older women in nineteenth-century North America. Existing historical accounts of the lives and position of older women in Canada and north-eastern USA are both partial and flawed, focusing mainly upon negative images of older women in poverty or in subjugated, passive domestic roles. These images of women's roles are based upon nineteenth-century guides and manuals which tended to portray later life as bleak, unfulfilling and restricted. However, through an examination of diaries and other biographical material describing the everyday lives of middle class women, contrasting evidence emerges of active and powerful roles and positive views of later life. It is argued that the examples discussed are not exceptional cases but rather are representative of a wider nineteenth-century pattern of older women undertaking satisfying and vital social roles within their family and community networks.

Alex Marsh and Moyra Riseborough, Making Ends Meet: Older People, Housing Association Costs and the Affordability of Rented Housing, National Federation of Housing Associations, London, 1995, 93 pp., no price, ISBN 0 862 97307 4.

Anthea Tinker, Fay Wright and Hannah Zeilig, Difficult to Let Sheltered Housing, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1995, 174 pp., £17.50, ISBN 0 113 21964 4.

Moyra Riseborough (ed.), Opening-up the Resources of Sheltered Housing to the Wider Community, Anchor Studies 3, Anchor Housing Association, Oxford, 1995, 32 pp., £7.50, ISBN 0 906 17827 4.

Bill Randall, Staying Put: The Best Move I'll Never Make, Anchor Housing Association, Oxford, 1995, unpaginated, £5.99, ISBN 0 906 17829 0.

For the last twenty years sheltered housing has dominated debates about housing and old age in Britain. There have recently been signs that its pre-eminent position may be threatened by the wider agenda stimulated by the community care reforms. But just when we thought the whole debate had run out of steam, back comes sheltered housing to dominate the policy debate and to re-capture the attention of housing officers. The nature of the debate now differs: gone are the heated discussions over whether sheltered housing is the answer to all our problems; rather, the key question is what to do with the increasing number of ‘difficult-to-let’ sheltered housing flats. Does this mean that the sceptics (including myself) were right all along and that sheltered housing really was ill-thought out and over-provided? After all, the main defence against these charges was that it was popular. Have older people turned against it too?