Beachhuff5314

The potential of Facebook as a tool to help older adults meet their relatedness needs is discussed.Distinguishing the Fourth Age (FoA) from the Third Age (ThA) has become a common practice in aging research. In this theoretical paper, we focus on four established conceptualizations of the ThA-FoA distinction, i.e., (1) Neugarten's work on the young-old vs. the old-old; (2) Laslett's concept of the innovative life period of the ThA; (3) Erikson's 9th life stage approach; and (4) Baltes' approach considering the FoA as the most radical incompleteness of the human condition. After a comparative descriptive analysis, we extract evaluative elements inherent in the four approaches according to six categories (1) fundamental values; (2) positive evaluative elements; (3) negative evaluative elements; (4) the decline vs. growth view; (5) the continuity vs. discontinuity view; and (6) values related to practical issues. As an overarching result of our analysis, we conclude that all conceptions face - in different ways - dilemmas that seem difficult to solve. One option may be to give up all ambitions toward agency for the FoA and indeed qualify this phase as the "aging without agency" phase of life. Doing so, however, seems ethically questionable, because it would give up acknowledged values connected with a good human life such as human goal-directed autonomy and freedom. In conclusion, the ThA-FoA distinction, although arguably a needed and helpful roadmap for the recent decades of aging science, comes with enduring disadvantages and eventually even risks. Therefore, in future aging science, we recommend avoiding the ThA-FoA distinction or at least using it only in combination with a critical attitude.In the West, many in the media and the health sector emphasize physical activity as important for the old, so that they can circumvent the impacts of aging and the associated costs. At the same time, neoliberal health discourse advises older people to avoid activities that may cause injuries, such as slips and falls, creating contradictions for older people who participate in sports on ice. In light of these mixed messages, this paper explores how older men understand their bodies through their participation in the seemingly risky sport of ice hockey. I conducted eighteen semi-structured interviews with older Canadian men who played hockey, identifying common themes related to aging, embodiment, risk and pleasure. Participants were aware that common-sense discourse produced hockey as risky for the old, but often downplayed this risk, privileging pleasure. Discourses associated with pleasure acted as an important way for older men to examine their bodies and contemplate the significance of hockey in their lives. Through the comradery players developed with each other, their interactions with the material objects of hockey, and their emplacement on hockey rinks and arenas, they found ways to celebrate their bodies as both aging and capable of experiencing pleasure - implicitly challenging neoliberal discourses of old age in the process.The growth of the older adult population and documented demand of health, allied health, and social care professionals contrast starkly with the reality that the eldercare field, including care organizations, struggle to attract and retain committed workers. Extant studies evaluate organizational capacity to engender commitment by examining various job and workplace factors. Drawing on 44 interviews, observations of 62 meetings, and a 5-year immersion, this organizational ethnography looks at commitment factors at a large, urban, faith-based residential senior care organization. Commitment factors are delineated on three levels such as daily tensions and rewards, value-based tensions and rewards, deal breakers and clinchers. Identity-based factors such as affective bonds with older persons and sharing in faith values sustain commitment on the person level whereas interprofessional tensions may detract from commitment. This study extends the knowledge base by incorporating perspectives of care workers such as social workers, chaplains, rehabilitation, recreational, diet and environmental services workers in addition to the more commonly examined groups such as nurses and certified nursing assistants, and in a setting that includes Assisted Living in addition to long-term care.This paper charts the emergence of under-remarked affinities between contemporary anti-aging technoscience and some social scientific work on biological aging. Both have recently sought to develop increasingly sophisticated operationalizations of age, aging and agedness as biological phenomena, in response to traditional notions of normal and chronological aging. Rather than being an interesting coincidence, these affinities indicate the influence of a biopolitics of successful aging on government, industry and social science. This biopolitics construes aging as a personal project that is mastered through specific forms of entrepreneurial individual action, especially consumption practices. Social scientists must remain alert to this biopolitics and its influence on their own work, because the individualization of cumulative inequalities provides intellectual and moral justifications for anti-aging interventions that exploit those inequalities.In an increasingly globalized world, the importance of developing a more culturally complex understanding of family care has been clearly identified. DSS Crosslinker manufacturer This study explored family care across three different cultural groups - Chinese, South Asian, and Latin American - living in a metropolitan, Pacific-West, Canadian city. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 29 family members from one of the three family groups exploring how they practiced 'care' for their aging, often frail, relatives. The importance of conceptualizing family care as a transnational, collective undertaking emerged from the outset as critical for understanding care practices in all three cultural communities. Three themes identified contributed to this conceptualization the need to broaden the understanding of family care; the centrality of geographic mobility, and the need to rethink the location of aging and consider its relationship to mobility; and the use of technology by extended family networks to facilitate continuity and connection.