Longitudinal studies can provide insights into how family members negotiate the caring role and carer identity over time. The analyses of the longitudinal, qualitative interviews on ‘living well’ with dementia from the IDEAL cohort study aimed to identify the shifting, embedded narratives of family members of people with dementia as they negotiated the caring role and carer identity over time. Twenty semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with family members of people with dementia and 14 were repeated one year later; these interviews were analysed using cross-sectional and longitudinal thematic and structural narrative analyses. Longitudinal, interrelated themes, including the care needs and decline of the person with dementia, relationship change and variable service support, framed the narrative types of family members. Six shifting narratives, apparent as dominant and secondary narrative types, characterized negotiating the caring role over time: absent/normalizing, active role adoption / carer identity, resistance, acceptance and resignation, hypervigilance/submergence and role entrapment, and foreshadowed future. The presence or absence of a carer identity was also evident from interviewees’ accounts, although, even where family members were overburdened by the caring role, they did not necessarily express a carer identity. Rather than considering transition into a carer identity, hearing different narratives within the caring role is important to understand how family members experience caring, whether they see themselves as ‘carers’, and when and how they need support. Timely and continued post-diagnostic support, where different caring narratives are recognized, is needed, as well as international initiatives for carer identification.

Assisting older people with body care is a vital aspect of long-term care, but is often considered mundane work and unarticulated in official discourses. Exploring body care practices can offer insights into unintended effects of prevailing discourses on the lives of older people. Drawing on poststructuralist understandings of subjectification in terms of dynamic processes depending on relational negotiations, this study explores how older people dependent on body care assistance negotiate the subject positions offered within the discourses. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork (December 2020–March 2021) including participant observations of 33 body care situations in home care and two residential care homes in Denmark. It analyses three cases, revealing how assisted body care in the context of home is profoundly influenced by dominant discourses of risk, positive ageing and homeliness, subjectifying older people as being at-risk or not-at-risk. At-risk are those not active or engaged in preventing biomedical risks related to old age, non-agentic and with limited possibilities in everyday life, while an acceptance of discourses of positive ageing and homeliness subjectify older people as not-at-risk, agentic and autonomous. A strong focus on positive ageing and homeliness in body care practices paradoxically holds the potential to de-legitimize ageing processes as well as subjective experiences of declining bodies and older people’s desire for a home that is not primarily a site of medical activity. The article highlights the need to critically discuss care practices that, despite being rooted in ideals of autonomy and the home as inviolable, often undermine these ideals in paradoxical ways.

The body acquires knowledge through interactions with the world. This knowledge resides in the body and shapes our physical, social and emotional experiences. Older adults possess extensive embodied knowledge, but its expression can be suppressed by environmental and social change, such as relocating to a residential care home (RCH). Dancing is more than movement; it is an embodied activity that involves complex interactions among the body, space, time and other people. Dance has been shown to benefit older adults, yet existing research often focuses on physical and cognitive outcomes, with limited attention to dance as an embodied lived experience, especially in an RCH context. This study explores six older adults’ lived experiences of dancing. Its interpretative phenomenological analysis reveals that participants possessed a vast reserve of embodied knowledge which emerged when they participated in synchronised seated dance. Two superordinate themes – embodied musicality and rekindled connections to the lifeworld – detail how older adults expressed embodied knowledge during dance, becoming connected with their body, space, time and others, nurturing a sense of self. Dancing also helped participants navigate the changes in their body and environment, enriching their living experience in an RCH. The findings contribute to the broader field of dance research, demonstrating how seated dance facilitates accessing and expressing embodied knowledge later in life, and to the limited research on dance in RCHs, positioning dance as a meaningful mode of self-expression and continuity for older adults, supporting their transition to these settings with rich emotional experiences.

Ageing is often framed through the lens of independence, with a strong emphasis on not burdening younger family members. Little attention, however, has been given to how this framing reflects and reinforces age inequality by devaluing older adults relative to younger ones. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 43 Italians aged 65 and older, conducted in 2018/2019 and 2022, we identify an orientation we term ‘altruistic ageing’ – a perspective that centres younger people’s needs by expecting older adults to adopt a selfless concern for others’ wellbeing. This orientation emerged in participants’ definitions of burden, which centred on receiving long-term or intensive assistance or co-residing with younger family members. These definitions reflected a privileging of younger adults’ time, personal freedom, social relationships and commitment to paid work. Altruistic ageing had consequences: It encouraged healthy behaviours but also narrowed acceptable long-term care options and constrained definitions of a ‘good death’. By unpacking the framing of older adults as burdens, our study reveals how age inequality operates through a culturally sanctioned ideal that morally justifies prioritizing the young over the old.

Voluntary assisted dying (VAD) is an end-of-life care option available to eligible Australians living with a terminal condition, though people living with dementia are typically ineligible to choose VAD as part of their end-of-life care. In order to develop equitable research-informed policy and practice, it is crucial to include the perspectives of all key stakeholders, including living experience experts whose voices are currently excluded from Australian VAD research. This study aims to capture the perspectives of people living with dementia by exploring their VAD-related needs and preferences. The study is grounded in a critical and phenomenological conceptual framework that prioritizes inclusive research design. Thirty-six people living with dementia in Australia self-selected to participate in an online survey. It found that the vast majority of participants wanted the option to access VAD themselves, and most wanted provisions for accessing VAD through advance care directives. Through open text responses, the participants expressed many concerns about potential end-of-life suffering and loss of dignity, with their VAD preferences often aligned with their wish to maintain autonomy and human rights. This is the first known Australian study to explore VAD from the perspective of people living with dementia, providing critical insights into their experiences as stakeholders in a highly contested policy and practice environment that is dominated by medico-legal voices. Centring on people living with dementia challenges misconceptions about their capacity to contribute to VAD research, demonstrating their importance as living experience experts and key stakeholders with clear needs and preferences for their end-of-life care.

This study addresses a critical gap in research on public services digitalization, specifically, how technology’s role and its relationship with ageing are framed within policy discourse. While digitalization holds the promise of enhanced accessibility, streamlined bureaucracy and greater transparency, it also has the potential to exacerbate social exclusion in ageing societies. Macro-level factors such as policy frameworks and societal values play a key role in either mitigating or intensifying these risks; they shape the way critical issues are defined and which responses are deemed conceivable. The study aims to critically examine how digitalization and ageing are framed in European and Italian policy documents, and assess the implications of these narratives for older adults. Methodologically, it analyses a corpus of 29 European and Italian policy documents on public service digitalization (2010–2023). Keywords extraction identified ten documents for critical discourse analysis, which revealed a dominant narrative of technological optimism where digitalization is presented as a universal solution, with limited acknowledgment of its potential downsides. At the European level, some documents recognize the rights of older adults, though such recognition remains sparse. Italian policies, in contrast, tend to prioritize technical and economic aspects, with little or no attention to digital exclusion or inequality. This study sheds light on how policy discourse can obscure structural inequalities and calls for more inclusive, reflective approaches to digitalization in ageing societies. It argues that policy discourse should be leveraged not only to promote innovation but also to foster social change and reduce exclusion among older adults.

While ageing in place emphasises autonomy and the preference of older adults to remain in familiar environments, and ageing and place shifts attention to their movement across multiple locations, both frameworks have paid insufficient attention to the role of social networks in shaping the spatial practices of ageing. In this article, we propose ageing in networks as a complementary approach that foregrounds relationality. Rather than supplanting place-based models, ageing in networks highlights how older adults navigate spaces—both near and far—through their social ties, and how these ties mediate access to emotional and practical support. Drawing on original survey data from 1,199 residents aged 60–92 in two Singaporean public housing areas (Hougang and Taman Jurong), we examine how older adults mobilise both strong and weak ties—including friends, co-workers, and digitally mediated contacts—across everyday sites such as hawker centres, markets, malls, and churches. These connections often span neighbourhoods, suggesting that older adults are not merely attached to their residential areas but are actively sustaining dispersed, networked geographies of care and companionship. Crucially, we find that expansive social ties can buffer the challenges of living alone. We argue that social isolation, more than spatial isolation, poses the greater risk to older adults’ well-being.

Divorce is increasingly common and can have a significant impact on later-life work and retirement. However, the lived experience of choice and control around divorce and its financial ramifications is not adequately understood. This article demonstrates how women and men differentially experience divorce as a long-run lifecourse factor, which can impact an individual’s scope for choice and control about working in later life, and how and when to retire. From a dataset of 47 in-depth interviews of workers aged over 50 in the United Kingdom from the international Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment project, findings show that the extent of choice and control at the time of divorce was constrained by individual and gendered lifecourse factors, by gendered, asymmetrical access to salient financial information and by emotional responses to relationship breakdown. Drawing on cumulative (dis)advantage over the lifecourse as a theoretical lens, this article demonstrates the ways in which short-term choices reinforce existing gendered and socio-economic (dis)advantage while instigating new pathways for (dis)advantage that have long-term implications for work and retirement.

Childlessness in late male adulthood is increasingly prevalent in rural China, indicating a need to understand the factors contributing to it. This group is often overlooked in gerontological and childlessness research. While existing studies have explored individual-level predictors of childlessness over the lifecourse and implications of broader societal conditions at the population level, little is known about how lifecourse and structural factors interact to shape pathways to childlessness. This study aims to investigate structural factors contributing to childlessness among older men in a rural area of northern China. It focuses on the life stories of 13 childless older men and the effects of history, timing and life-domain interdependencies, finding that some participants experienced intense disruptive life events or critical turning points – early-life care-giving responsibilities, disability or withdrawal from school – that altered their life trajectories. These events often intersected with structural factors, including unstable and low-paid employment, lack of social protection and prevailing social norms, which reinforced one another and jointly constrained prospects for marriage and parenthood. These trajectories unfolded within shifting policy contexts; institutional arrangements across different historical periods shaped and often produced disadvantages in the marriage market. This study advances theoretical understanding of the structural factors contributing to male childlessness by recognizing life trajectories, structural shifts and social relations as linked factors shaping cumulative disadvantage in union formation and childbearing. Its policy implications surround supporting individuals who intend to form families during critical life transitions and addressing the broader structural barriers that shape male childlessness in rural areas.

This article explores the experiences of social participation among Indigenous, migrant and older people with disabilities in Chile. While substantial evidence shows the importance of social participation in ageing policy, research on how diverse groups of older people in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) perceive and engage in it is limited. The article examines the participatory practices of these populations and the challenges they face in accessing and being included in their chosen spaces of engagement. Six focus groups were held with key informants from government offices and community-based organizations, and individual in-depth interviews were conducted with older people. The collected data were then analysed using an inductive content analysis approach. Findings show that several historical and structural factors influence social participation among the three studied groups, particularly their vulnerability to precarity and discrimination in the Chilean context. The dominant perspective of key informants on social participation – as a means of staying healthy, keeping busy and finding contentment – should be contrasted with the actual social, cultural and economic circumstances. Indeed, most of the older participants in this study stated that they use social participation as a means of exercising agency, as it allows them to develop significant and supportive relationships that facilitate their daily lives and provide opportunities for individual and collective empowerment. This article contributes to the development of social gerontology in the Global South by integrating diversity into research design and enhancing understanding of the conditions under which people in Chile age and participate in society.

Demographic changes in rates of living alone, migration, and having no living partner, spouse, or children are leaving more older adults without the typical uncompensated familial and non-familial care partners that are the backbone of long-term care provision. We aimed to understand the precarities and outcomes specifically experienced by older adults without care partners to inform future intervention development. Using the Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines and PRISMA-ScR protocol, we conducted a scoping review of nine databases to map the current peer-reviewed evidence regarding these indivdiduals’ precarities, outcomes, and interventions using the Health Equity Promotion Model (HEPM) as our guiding framework. Our comprehensive search strategy resulted in 5,100 unique articles, 33 of which met our inclusion criteria. Three independent reviewers screened and extracted data, and the first author used deductive content analysis with the pre-specified HEPM framework. Fifteen studies reported precarities related to environmental/structural forces, and psychological, social, behavioral, and biological processes. Twenty-four studies reported adverse health and well-being outcomes with more focus on health than well-being outcomes (19 versus 8). Four studies tested interventions, and reported environmental/structural, social, and behavioral processes and health and well-being outcomes. Only 13 of the 33 reviewed studies set out to explicitly study older adults without care partners, and no studies focused on marginalized sub-groups. This scoping review highlights our lack of understanding of older adults without care partners’ distinctive precarities and outcomes, and the vital research needed to develop and test interventions that effectively address their unique needs.

While there is consensus about the combined relevance of liberal regime policies and gendered employment and family trajectories in adulthood, for shaping employment in later life, so far there is no single cross-national study simultaneously addressing these dimensions. Drawing on exceptionally rich, harmonised life history data, we explore the association between employment and family patterns in adulthood, and the prevalence, duration and diversity of extended working lives beyond full pension age, among men and women in four predominantly liberal countries: two from Europe (England and Switzerland) and two from the Americas (the United States and Chile). Our findings indicate that employment trajectories – unlike partnership and fertility trajectories – play a significant role in shaping the prevalence, duration and diversity of later-life employment across the four countries examined. Furthermore, gender differences in later-life employment patterns are particularly notable in England and Chile. Our comparative perspective reveals that while liberal regimes share certain characteristics, they also exhibit significant diversity in how extended working lives manifest and are influenced by lifecourse trajectories.

Population ageing, increased immigration and strained public resources will challenge the future provision of formal older-age care. Despite growing diversity in older populations across Western countries, evidence on health-care utilization among older immigrants remains limited. Using full-population registry data from Norway (2011–2016) for individuals aged 60+, we examined transitions into home health care (HHC) and intensity of use (hours/day) by immigrant background. Across all country-of-origin groups, immigrants had lower odds of transitioning into HHC than natives, with differences narrowing as duration of residence increased. A broad socio-demographic patterning to HHC transitions generally held across the country background groupings. Higher transition likelihoods were observed for individuals with lower education, lower income, living alone, and residing in less urban areas. Childlessness was linked to higher relative transition propensities among natives and Nordic immigrants, but lower relative propensities among Western-origin and Eastern European immigrants. Among non-Western immigrants, childlessness appeared to have little influence on transition propensities. For HHC intensity, only non-Western immigrants received significantly fewer hours of care than natives. Subsequent analysis indicated that this difference was entirely contingent on living alone: Only non-Western immigrants living alone had significantly fewer hours of care than natives (living alone or otherwise). These findings highlight clear variation in HHC utilization by immigrant background and socio-demographic characteristics. Future research should investigate whether lower HHC use among older immigrants reflects reduced need or barriers to access. It will also be important to assess how compositional changes in the immigrant population may influence future patterns of HHC utilization.

Older people want to live at home for as long as possible and expect a system of care to enable this. This desire is also recognized in many national policies, where ageing in place with the support of informal caregivers is increasingly seen as a viable solution to institutional care. Despite this, refusal of such care at point of delivery can create further health issues for individuals as well as organizational challenges for care providers. This study aims to explore older people’s perceptions of why homecare is, or may be, refused. It builds on a quantitative study, where 18 per cent of instances of non-delivery of homecare in one major care provider in Scotland were categorized as ‘Service Refusal’. Data from a convenience sample of 17 people, aged 65 years and older, with experience of homecare, from the Greater Glasgow and Clyde area in Scotland, underwent framework analysis. In contrast to the quantitative study, this study uncovered an unexpected propensity for service acceptance; living at home was the presiding value and the main motivating factor to accept homecare, irrespective of its quality. This study provides a deeper understanding of the complexities of homecare from those who receive it, highlighting critical insights to inform governmental initiatives and homecare service providers. Allowing people to remain at home for as long as possible with appropriate and sustainable homecare should be central to national outcomes in Scotland, with the findings of this study also providing useful insights for homecare providers internationally.

Trans people are among the most marginalized and stigmatized groups globally, facing high risks of discrimination, violence and abuse. In Colombia, older adults experience significant vulnerabilities and poverty, which are exacerbated for those with diverse gender identities, a population that remains invisible in this country. The existing literature on the ageing experiences of trans individuals, particularly in Latin America, is scarce, yet trans individuals in this region face widespread violence and discrimination. This article addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the ageing challenges encountered by Colombian trans women, through a qualitative study involving 23 trans women aged 50–67 living in Bogotá. It finds that older trans women face barriers throughout their lives, including stigma, gender-based violence, stigmatizing policies and political erasure. While some barriers persist for their lifecourse, others emerge in later life. A few resources are available at the structural, societal and individual levels to help trans women in Columbia cope with the ageing process. This article contributes to the limited knowledge of ageing in trans populations in the Global South. It shows how legal and social frameworks are pivotal in shaping ageing experiences that are unique to Colombia in ways not thoroughly explored in the Global North. It underscores the need for inclusive policies and practices that address the specific challenges of trans older adults. By adding to the social gerontological scholarship, this article will help inform debates and guide future research and policy development.

To what extent should workers in physically demanding jobs be given the possibility of earlier retirement? This is one of the many pressing pension reform issues that ageing societies face. This article examines the extent to which such special treatment is supported by the general public. We uniquely combine a representative survey (2,136 respondents) with a vignette study to explore what respondents in the Netherlands consider a fair public pension age for 29 jobs that differ by level of physical demand. We also examine whether these pension ages are associated with other attributes that are important in an ageing society, such as the presence of chronic health conditions and informal care-giving responsibilities – such attributes may affect support for the special provisions for workers in physically demanding jobs – and control for stereotypical views about older workers. The findings reveal notable differences in public pension ages, indicating that workers in highly physically demanding jobs should be given the opportunity to retire earlier and those working in physically ‘light’ jobs should work slightly beyond the standard public pension age. We compare these differences to existing special retirement programmes for physically demanding or arduous jobs. Interestingly, non-work factors – namely, chronic health conditions and care-giving responsibilities – weigh more heavily in deciding a fair or reasonable public pension age. This suggests that organizations and policy makers facing an ageing society will have to deal with a broader set of problems than can be solved by offering early retirement programmes for specific jobs.

Informal care-giving studies have largely ignored how gender and labour force participation intersect to shape filial support across diverse national contexts over time. In particular, comparative longitudinal research that explores care-giving intensity in relation to adult children’s employment status and gender remains scarce. This study addresses this gap by developing a typology of filial support and examining how care-giving patterns vary by gender and labour force participation across different country clusters in Europe and Israel.

Drawing on longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we apply latent Markov models and multi-level latent class analysis to identify seven distinct filial support states, ranging from no support to very intense support. We also classify 28 countries into three clusters based on levels of involvement in filial support: low, moderate and high.

Our findings indicate significant disparities based on gender and employment status, with daughters tending to provide more intensive support than sons, even when employed. Unemployed sons in countries with moderate involvement in filial support were three times more likely to provide intensive care compared to their counterparts in countries characterized by low or higher involvement. These variations suggest that support to ageing parents is deeply shaped by gendered employment opportunities and cultural care-giving norms.

This complexity underscores the necessity for nuanced policy approaches to support care-givers effectively, considering both gender inequalities and employment contexts. Recognizing these intricate patterns of informal care can inform targeted interventions, ultimately addressing the care-giving burden within ageing societies more effectively.

Social integration is a critical predictor of health and wellbeing for older people, yet limited research examines how older people experiencing homelessness navigate social integration and what their needs are. This study explores how 20 older adults with lived experiences of homelessness and housing precarity perceive and experience social integration in an independent housing setting with on-site support. Additionally, it aims to identify the factors that facilitate and promote social integration for this population. Drawing on semi-structured lifecourse interviews and photovoice sessions, reflexive thematic analysis identified four key themes: (1) From isolation to inclusion: narratives on social integration; (2) Space, place and social integration; (3) Unlocking pathways to deep and meaningful social interactions; and (4) Navigating social integration: the vital role of autonomy and choice. The findings reveal that social integration exists along a continuum. While some participants valued solitude and independence, others actively sought meaningful connections, or occupied a middle ground, engaging in casual interactions. Social integration was influenced by three factors: the built and natural environment, opportunities for deep and meaningful interactions, and individual autonomy and choice. These findings add to the knowledge and debate surrounding the definition of social integration and its contributory factors, especially for older adults with experiences of homelessness and housing precarity. The study underscores the need for different housing models and environments to accommodate and cater across the social integration continuum, ensuring that everyone can find their place within the community and engage in a way that feels comfortable and fulfilling for them.

This article addresses the limited understanding of how variegated practices of everyday automobility shape – and are shaped by – ageing processes of older adults in urban contexts, focusing on Brescia, Northern Italy. While automobility, driving and driving cessation are often studied as functional aspects of older adults’ (im)mobility, their relational dimensions – spanning multiple and diverse practices – remain largely under-explored. The research examines how older adults navigate the contradictions and challenges of urban life, health conditions and social structures through relational automobilities. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study, the article highlights how automobility serves simultaneously as a resource, a limitation and a medium for forging and sustaining social, emotional, geographical and material relationships. The findings reveal that diverse practices and experiences of automobility are deeply embedded in affective economies, interdependencies and the biopolitics of ageing, shaping – and being shaped by – the lived experiences of older adults. By conceptualizing automobility as a socio-material and relational process, the article aims at bridging critical gerontology and mobilities studies, offering new insights into how ageing and mobility practices co-produce ageing selves and conditions of being (im)mobile. This study contributes to ongoing debates in critical gerontology by problematizing dichotomic understandings of older adults’ experiences in terms such as independence versus dependence and mobility versus stasis, while also informing urban policies aimed at fostering inclusive mobility practices. This article emphasizes the need to address the socio-material and relational networks underpinning automobility, offering a nuanced perspective on the interplay between mobility, ageing and urban life.