The Fourth Age in Prospect.

OBJECTIVES: Higgs and Gilleard (2015) have uniquely theorized the fourth age as a "social imaginary" of deep old age that blends notions of frailty, abjection, and the moral relations of care. This report evaluates the coherence and reach of the fourth-age imaginary among older adults in relative good health. METHODS: In a qualitative design and within samples at 5 sites (in Czechia, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States), 138 adults aged 70+ and still living independently discussed what it would mean to be "not independent" in later life. Replies referenced other people in general, specific people, and one's own actual or potential experience. RESULTS: Pooled across sites, the views of our participants confirm the theorized features of the social imaginary. Participants spoke readily of gateway infirmities heralding frailty and of frailty's abjection; expressed dread and abhorrence of dependence, some saying that death would be preferable; and were anxious about nursing homes and about burdening others with an obligation to care for them. DISCUSSION: The bleak but formidable reputation of the fourth age impinges on those living in the third. The consonant expression of fourth-age features among older adults on 3 continents supports Gilleard and Higgs's claim that the fourth-age imaginary "contains a universal ontological quality" owing to human corporeality and the senescence to which it is subject. Fourth-age studies that document the lived experience of frailty and dependence have the potential to undermine the imaginary and furnish new narratives for facing the future.

Job satisfaction in birth cohorts of nurses.

AIM: The aim of the present study was to investigate which hospital, unit and individual characteristics predict job satisfaction in four age cohorts of registered nurses (RNs). BACKGROUND: Adequate supply of direct care nurses in hospitals is paramount to the provision of safe patient care. While recruitment is important, interventions to retain experienced nurses in the work force should also be undertaken. METHODS: Cross-sectional survey data from the 2004 National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators(®) (NDNQI(®) ) RN Survey with Job Satisfaction Scales(©) were used. The sample included 53 851 RNs age 20-59 years divided into four age cohorts. Data were analysed using three-level hierarchical linear modelling. RESULTS: Overtime demand and involuntary floating resulted in significantly lower job satisfaction in all age cohorts. The oldest two cohorts reported higher job satisfaction with increased unit tenure whereas the youngest cohort reported decreased job satisfaction with increased unit tenure. Higher job satisfaction was reported in all cohorts within Magnet hospitals; however, the relationship was only significant in 40-49 year olds. CONCLUSIONS: Some factors are associated with job satisfaction in all age cohorts. Other factors differentially influence job satisfaction based on the cohort group. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT: Nurse leaders should consider retention strategies congruent with the job satisfaction predictors of different age groups.

What will you do with all that time? Changes in leisure activities after retirement are determined by age-related self-views and preparation.

Retirement is a normative life transition that liberates the individual from the external obligations of employment, being a catalyzer of leisure activity engagement. However, the individual's motivations to engage in leisure activities in the time that is gained after retirement may depend on their future self-views (i.e., views of their own ageing) as well as on their levels of preparation for age-related changes. In this study, therefore, we aim to examine longitudinal changes in levels of engagement in leisure activities that occur around the age of retirement as being influenced by views on ageing and preparation for old age. The sample consisted of 451 persons aged 50-65 years at baseline who participated in the Ageing as Future study at two time points 5 years apart. Participants were split in three age-matched groups: recently retired (in between baseline and follow-up), already retired (at baseline), and individuals who were still working (at follow-up). Findings indicated that changes in levels of leisure differed between groups. Compared to both already retired and still working participants, recently retired participants increased their levels of engagement in leisure activities. Positive views on ageing in the leisure domain (at baseline) predicted subsequent increases in activity levels but group and levels of preparation qualified this effect. A combination of positive views on ageing and preparation for age-related changes is needed for one to make use of the time that is gained with retirement, highlighting their role as determinants of behavior in response to normative life events in later life.

Perceived benefits of VFW post participation for older adults.

Older adults, as active members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), describe multiple benefits of participation in the organization to their overall well-being. This qualitative study examined the perspectives of 20 active participants of a VFW Post and its Ladies Auxiliary. Findings indicate that, for the study participants, the VFW serves as a primary source of cross-generational influence, emotional support, and meaningful activity and provides a safe and secure environment for members. This article provides valuable information that social work researchers and practitioners can use to help increase older adults' civic engagement and address service gaps.

Measurement of late-life residential relocation: why are rates for such a manifest event so varied?

OBJECTIVES: This methods article examines how characteristics of residential relocation (e.g., housing type) and research design decisions (e.g., level of analysis, geographic scale) influence reported rates for residential relocation among older adults. METHODS: Examination of key studies on late-life residential relocation (1992-2005) revealed a wide range of residential mobility rates and factors that contributed to this variation. These rates were rescaled to a common 5-year time period to allow for a degree of comparison across methodological approaches. RESULTS: We identified a wide range of rates for residential relocation in the literature (from 5% to more than 30% for a 5-year time period). Research design decisions accounted for much of the variation in these rates across studies; geographic scale was associated with the greatest amount of variation. DISCUSSION: We translate the findings into concrete suggestions for investigators. The article provides the background needed to identify the research design best suited to the end purpose of studies on residential relocation (e.g., inform economic policy, understand the individual's aging experience, plan for long-term-care systems). These methodological issues are also relevant to other areas of investigation in which relocation influences the variables being studied (e.g., caregiving, urban planning, neighborhood development).

The dog that didn't bark: The challenge of cross-cultural qualitative research on aging.

The paper addresses the problem of cultural proximity in qualitative cross-cultural research on aging, presenting insights into a methodology of systematic 'estrangement'. Based on interdisciplinary research on the social time orientations of elderly people in Germany, Hong Kong, and the US, we discuss the question of how shared identities and taken-for-granted assumptions may bias the findings in comparative aging studies. With Alfred Schütz's phenomenological concept of 'lifeworld' as a methodological device, we focus on the issue of the diverging 'systems of relevance' that each of the national project teams obviously referred to when gathering and interpreting the data. The paper suggests that, by way of organizing an interactive research setting that is open for the reciprocity of perspectives, one of the major problems for cross-cultural research on aging may be overcome or at least mitigated.

What We Need to Know About Retirement: Pressing Issues for the Coming Decade.

The current landscape of retirement is changing dramatically as population aging becomes increasingly visible. This review of pressing retirement issues advocates research on (a) changing meanings of retirement, (b) impact of technology, (c) the role of housing in retirement, (d) human resource strategies, (e) adjustment to changing retirement policies, (f) the pension industry, and (g) the role of ethnic diversity in retirement.

Residential Reasoning and the Tug of the Fourth Age.

Purpose of the Study: Where to grow older occupies the minds of many aging adults. This study examines how anticipation of the fourth age influences third-age residential reasoning. It also investigates the role of social relationships in choosing housing for later life. Design and Methods: Analyses were based on semi-structured interviews with 30 community-dwelling retirees aged 67-97 who were asked about preparations for the future, including housing. Results: Replies about future housing fell into two categories: preemptive and contingent. In preemptive reasoning, participants anticipated that their current homes would be suitable over the long term and explained why, while those engaged in contingent reasoning could imagine a possible future move to more supportive housing and even had destination places in mind. Both types of responses reflect residential reasoning that is ongoing and driven in large part by anticipation of fourth-age vulnerabilities. Peers influenced participants' thinking about whether, when, and where to move. Relationships with spouses and offspring were also factors commonly mentioned in residential reasoning, both in terms of sources of support and perceived obligations. Implications: The fourth age is generally conceived as an experience of loss, but it also functions as a social imaginary. Our study suggests that the fourth age, both as a potential personal destiny and a social construct, influences housing decisions among those firmly in the third age. More attention in housing research to prudential anticipation of the fourth age as well as the relational aspects of residential reasoning would enhance understanding of late-life housing choices.

Is longevity a value for older adults?

Longevity is an aspiration at the population level, a goal of public health policy and research. In the later decades of life, longevity goals also deserve scrutiny at the personal level to understand whether people welcome longer lives. Contradictory preferences could be expected, both the embrace of longevity and hesitation. The desire for extended life was examined using qualitative interviews in parallel designs among 90 persons aged 62 and older at sites in Germany, China, and the United States. Just over one third of the participants declined to express aspirations for longer life, some because they felt that their lives had reached a stage of completion and some as a form of fate acceptance. A larger number did indeed want extended lives but less than half estimated an amount of time that they desired. Moreover, there was strong opinion that longer lives were desirable only if current or acceptable levels of health were maintained. These replies indicate that future time is welcome so long as it occurs in the "third age" of independent living and not in the "fourth age" of vulnerability and decline. Replies also reveal that many older adults in these three cultures conceptually map the future not as a smooth continuum of time but rather as segmented into states, one kind of which is wanted and one which is not.

Gerontology in Five Images.

In his Kent Award lecture, Scott Bass called for a greater coherence of gerontology. This article proposes that the teaching of gerontology is one way to address the centrifugal tendencies of the field and economize its disciplinary sprawl. The instructional strategy is to concentrate attention to a limited number of focal visuals from which the exposition of gerontological knowledge can radiate out and to which it can circle back. The 5 images selected here synthesize numerous ideas about life course; senescence, development, and interventions in these processes; the long gestation of relative health and illness; the succession of cohorts and social change; and the question of preparing for and managing the uncertainties of adult life. The 5 pictures and charts show some common features, such as lifelong flows of time and a recurring arc-like shape that is used to depict them. A sixth image is suggested in order to counter the impression that aging is a process of diminishment. Most knowledge about aging is rooted in a core discipline, but the teaching of that knowledge beyond the discipline can integrate content in fruitful ways.

Assisted living: a place to manage uncertainty. The ambiguity of assisted living is unavoidable because residents' needs are always changing. The Wheat Valley example is used to examine this concept.

The assisted living environment lacks the satisfying clarity of the consumer model (a stay at the Holiday Inn) or the medical model (the hospital or nursing home). Yet the ambiguity of assisted living is unavoidable because it shelters individuals whose needs are changing, the model of care requires extensive negotiation with residents, and staff members must continually compromise as they implement the principles. Assisted living is a place where uncertainty is managed, not resolved. This indicates a need for the further pursuit of qualitative research, such as reported by these articles and others (e.g., Carder, 2002), to explore how participants construct, make sense of, and interpret their daily experience in assisted living.

Possession divestment by sales in later life.

Residential relocation in later life is almost always a downsizing, with many possessions to be divested in a short period of time. This article examines older movers' capacities for selling things, and ways that selling attenuates people's ties to those things, thus accomplishing the human dis-possession of the material convoy. In qualitative interviews in 79 households in the Midwestern United States, older adults reported their experience with possession sales associated with residential relocation. Among this group, three-quarters of the households downsized by selling some belongings. Informal sales seemed the least fraught of all strategies, estate sales had mixed reviews, and garage sales were recalled as laborious. Sellers' efforts were eased by social relations and social networks as helpers and buyers came forward. As selling proceeded, sentiment about possessions waned as their materiality and economic value came to the fore, easing their detachment from the household. Possession selling is challenging because older adults are limited in the knowledge, skills, and efforts that they can apply to the recommodification of their belongings. Selling can nonetheless be encouraged as a divestment strategy as long as the frustrations and drawbacks are transparent, and the goal of ridding is kept in view.

Born to retire: the foreshortened life course.

Retirement is no longer a concern solely for the second half of life. Rather, the idea that we will someday retire is increasingly present to all adults and it is even urged on adolescents. The earliest reaches of adulthood are being colonized by frequent reminders that it takes individual effort to achieve retirement. The changing nature of pensions, the identification of retirement saving with financial markets, the politics of Social Security, the aging baby boom generation, and the interests of a powerful industry and of government are daily compelling people's attention to retirement as a lifelong goal. With retirement as adulthood's great project of deferred gratification, the result could be greater personal readiness to retire but also some ironic outcomes, such as a stronger retirement norm, reluctance to spend on children, and outsized expectations for later life.

Workers' ignorance of retirement benefits.

PURPOSE: This study considered the extent of workers' unfamiliarity with retirement benefits, a problem that could compromise informed retirement planning. DESIGN AND METHODS: Among workers in the 1992 Health and Retirement Study, we examined the frequency of "don't know" responses to question series about employer pensions, health insurance, and Social Security. RESULTS: Eligible workers readily offered responses about the shared, public details of pension plans, but knowledge about personal pension wealth was lacking for one third of persons in defined benefit plans and for one fifth of those in defined contribution plans. Among household financial respondents, 14% did not know about health insurance continuation after retirement, and 52% could not offer an expected Social Security amount. Such nonresponse was patterned by proximity to retirement and by social and occupational factors. IMPLICATIONS: More than a problem of missing data, these findings argue for a theoretical reconsideration of the role of financial knowledge in retirement behavior. Ignorance of benefits is probably less a problem of disclosure than of workers' inattention to available information.

Household disbandment in later life.

OBJECTIVE: This study described activities that older people undertake to reduce the volume of their possessions in the course of a residential move to smaller quarters, a process with practical, cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions. METHODS: Qualitative interviews were conducted with members of 30 households who had moved in the prior year. The disbandment period, typically lasting about 2 months, was a particular focus of the interview. RESULT: The interviews suggested nine reasons why people had accumulated and kept things, which now became problematic for the impending move. The initial steps of disbandment entailed decisions about major furniture and meaningful gifts to family and friends, followed by evaluation of the remaining belongings for retention, sale, further gifts, donation, or discard. Things not divested by one means were reassigned to another strategy. People took pleasure in dispositions that saw their things used, cared for, and valued as they had done, thus fulfilling a responsibility to their belongings. DISCUSSION: Disbandment is an acute episode of a more general, lifelong process of possession management. It is an encounter with things that are meaningful to the self, but as it unfolds, it also makes new meaning for things.

The material convoy after age 50.

OBJECTIVES: Possessions constitute a dynamic "material convoy" that accumulates across adulthood to furnish role enactments and the development of the self. Following a familiar life course arc, older people should hypothetically release the possessions that equipped the daily lives that they no longer have. METHOD: We use new survey data on possession divestment from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study to assess activity on behalf of the material convoy after age 50. RESULTS: After age 50, people are progressively less likely to divest themselves of belongings. After age 70, about 30% of persons say that they have done nothing in the past year to clean out, give away, or donate things, and over 80% have sold nothing. We tested whether divestments diminish with age because they do not seem necessary or because of health limitations, but the age pattern is robust, suggesting retention of the material convoy in later life. DISCUSSION: Further research on this age pattern might consider housing, the construction of the self, and social networks as explanations for retention. Inertia toward the material convoy maintains the availability and comfort of things, but it may also lead to a predicament wherein the collection becomes a worry for self and others.

The reproduction of gender norms through downsizing in later life residential relocation.

Using data collected from qualitative interviews in 36 households, this article examines people's use of social relations based on gender to perform tasks associated with residential relocation in later life. Without prompting, our respondents addressed the social relations of gender in the meanings of things, in the persons of gift recipients, and in the persons of actors accomplishing the tasks. They matched gender-typed objects to same-sex recipients, reproducing circumstances of possession and passing on expectations for gender identity. The accounts of our respondents also depicted a gendered division of household labor between husbands and wives and a gendered division of care work by daughters and sons. These strategies economized a big task by shaping decisions about who should get what and who will do what. In turn, these practices affirmed the gendered nature of possession and care work into another generation.

Safe passage of goods and self during residential relocation in later life.

Techniques of possession research among older people tend to accentuate their prizing of things and their use of special dispositions to achieve the protection or 'safe passage' of things as they transfer to a new owner. Such efforts on behalf of possessions may also be undertaken to perpetuate the self. To study the care of things and self in a wider context, we examined older people's repertoire of disposition strategies during episodes of household relocation and downsizing. We analysed the narratives of persons in 75 households in the Midwestern United States of America. People indeed told stories about the safe passage of cherished possessions - their initiative to place things, appreciation by new owners, and attempts to project the values or memory of the giver. Such accounts of special placements, however, dotted rather than dominated recollections of the move. More commonly, large quantities of items were passed via non-specific offers of possessions to others who may volunteer to take them. This allowed people to nonetheless express satisfaction that their possessions had found appreciative owners. Even though our interviews did not disclose extensive attempts at self-transmission, whole-house downsizing may affirm the self in another way: as conscientious about the care of things. Such affirmation of the present self as accomplished and responsible can be seen as a positive adaptation to the narrowing life world.