Digital skills training for older people: The importance of the 'lifeworld'.

When everyday life becomes ever more permeated by digital technologies, many older people join ICT trainings to improve their digital skills. Given that digital skills include more than the command of technology (for instance, changing social practices) teaching ICT to people who grew up long before internet and social media can be challenging. The purpose of this article is to propose a theoretical account of a key element for how teaching digital skills to older people can be made successful. Drawing on qualitative interview data with 26 ICT instructors as well as concepts from sociological theory (lifeworld, role-taking) and cognitive science (dual process model), we argue that ICT training needs to take into account the lifeworlds of older participants. In order to be successful, ICT trainings have to appeal to the current lifeworlds of older people while at the same time overcome mismatching lifeworlds. By connecting content and pedagogics to the older adults' needs, values, and desires, instructors can successfully help integrate new skills into the lifeworld of the older participants.

The lost Gemeinschaft: how people working with the elderly explain loneliness.

We conducted a qualitative interview study with people of different professions working with lonely elderly people. The rationale of the study was to examine how these respondents explain loneliness among the elderly. The present article focuses on the social explanations, i.e. explanations that identify causes of loneliness in the structure of modern society. We found that many of the social explanations given are aspects of a more encompassing and general pattern underlying all the reasoning about loneliness among the elderly. This pattern is the expression of two contrasting images of society which the classical sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies termed Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). The former refers to traditional or small-size rural communities characterized by high degrees of social cohesion, integration, solidarity, proximity and familiarity, whereas the latter refers to functional differentiation, distance, individualization, exchanged-based social relations and anonymity. Loneliness among the elderly is explained by the lack of Gemeinschaft and its characteristics in contemporary society. This explanatory pattern goes hand in hand with a critical view of contemporary society and a nostalgic yearning for the lost communities of past societies, where inhabitants find their staked-out place and sense of belonging, and thus loneliness hardly seems to occur. We summarized this view under the label the "lost Gemeinschaft".

Agents of their health? How the Swedish welfare state introduces expectations of individual responsibility.

In recent years, the notion of individual responsibility for one's health has been introduced into Swedish medico-political debate. Formerly expressed as a recommendation, it has now taken on the form of expectations. In a Swedish context, this shift from collective to individual responsibility is novel because it implies a break with well-established welfare state practice of comprehensive care for their citizens. Using a systems-theoretical approach, we interpret this shift of expectations as a political solution to the problem of legitimate allocation of scarce resources. A more inclusive medical conception of illness has facilitated the introduction of many new diagnoses that, in turn, have lead to a strong increase in claims for medical treatment and for compensation. This semantic change in medicine aggravates the budgetary situation of the welfare state. The political solution lies in a reorientation of the expectations the medical system can have on citizens as well as a shift of the expectations regarding the rights and obligations citizens can have on the medical system. Individuals are increasingly expected to live healthy lifestyles and to avoid hazardous habits. If they do not live up to these expectations, they have to face low prioritisation or denial of treatment.