‘At home it's just so much easier to be yourself’: older adults' perceptions of ageing in place

ABSTRACTBy 2050, the number of people in Australia aged over 85 is expected to quadruple. Yet, from a socio-psychological research perspective, little is known about the experiences of people who continue to live at home during late old age (85 years and over), a period when challenging problems associated with ageing escalate and threaten to compromise independence. Utilising a qualitative methodology, the subjective lived experience of 23 very old adults (19 women, four men, with a mean age of 90.7 years, range 85–101 years) who live independently in rural Australia were elicited. The aims of the research were to understand their thoughts and feelings about ageing in place at home, and what psychological, social and practical adaptive strategies they employ to cope with difficulties encountered during very old age. In-depth interviews were analysed in an interpretive phenomenological tradition of thematic analysis, interpretation of paradigm cases and interpretation of exemplars. Participants described how historical, cultural and environmental contexts shaped their everyday thoughts, activities and what was meaningful for them. The findings add to our understanding of the largely unnarrated lives of the very old, suggest a need for person-centred home-care assessment processes and aid significant others (family, friends and neighbours) to understand better what very old adults need to live independently.

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Linking Emotion Regulation Capacity and the Frequency of Daily Stressors in Old and Very Old Age

Innovation in Aging ◽

10.1093/geroni/igab046.1279 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽

pp. 331-331

Author(s):

Denis Gerstorf ◽

Anna Lücke ◽

Hans-Werner Wahl ◽

Oliver Schilling ◽

Ute Kunzmann ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotion Regulation ◽

Old Age ◽

Negative Emotion ◽

Daily Stressors ◽

Very Old ◽

Old Adults ◽

Film Clips ◽

Very Old Age ◽

Young Old ◽

Initial Results

Abstract Lifespan theories and lab-based research both suggest that the ability to downregulate negative emotions is often well preserved into old age, but becomes increasingly fragile in very old age. However, little is known about factors that may alleviate such age differences. Here, we ask whether exposure to daily stressors helps very old adults to maintain effective emotion regulation skills. We used data from 130 young-old (65-69 years, 48% women) and 59 very-old adults (83-89 years, 58% women) who watched negative emotion evoking film clips in the lab under emotion regulation instructions and also reported stress situations they experienced in everyday life (42 occasions across seven days). Initial results indicate that very-old adults were indeed less successful in regulating sadness than young-old adults, but those very-old adults who reported many daily stressful situations were as capable of emotion regulation as young-old adults. We discuss possible factors contributing to our age-differential findings.

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Associations of Wellbeing Levels, Changes, and Within-Person Variability With Late-Life All-Cause Mortality Across 12 Years: Contrasting Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Wellbeing Among Very Old Adults

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750891 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

Author(s):

Oliver Karl Schilling ◽

Markus Wettstein ◽

Hans-Werner Wahl

Keyword(s):

Old Age ◽

Structural Equation ◽

Structural Equation Models ◽

Oldest Old ◽

Residual Lifetime ◽

Very Old ◽

Old Adults ◽

All Cause Mortality ◽

Mortality Predictors ◽

Eudaimonic Wellbeing

Advanced old age has been characterized as a biologically highly vulnerable life phase. Biological, morbidity-, and cognitive impairment-related factors play an important role as mortality predictors among very old adults. However, it is largely unknown whether previous findings confirming the role of different wellbeing domains for mortality translate to survival among the oldest-old individuals. Moreover, the distinction established in the wellbeing literature between hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing as well as the consideration of within-person variability of potentially relevant mortality predictors has not sufficiently been addressed in prior mortality research. In this study, we examined a broad set of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing indicators, including their levels, their changes, as well as their within-person variability, as predictors of all-cause mortality in a sample of very old individuals. We used data from the LateLine study, a 7-year longitudinal study based on a sample of n = 124 individuals who were living alone and who were aged 87–97 years (M = 90.6, SD = 2.9) at baseline. Study participants provided up to 16 measurement occasions (mean number of measurement occasions per individual = 5.50, SD = 4.79) between 2009 and 2016. Dates of death were available for 118 individuals (95.2%) who had deceased between 2009 and 2021. We ran longitudinal multilevel structural equation models and specified between-person level differences, within-person long-term linear change trends, as well as the “detrended” within-person variability in three indicators of hedonic (i.e., life satisfaction and positive and negative affect) and four indicators of eudaimonic wellbeing (i.e., purpose in life, autonomy, environmental mastery, and self-acceptance) as all-cause mortality predictors. Controlling for age, gender, education, and physical condition and testing our sets of hedonic and eudaimonic indictors separately in terms of their mortality impact, solely one eudaimonic wellbeing indicator, namely, autonomy, showed significant effects on survival. Surprisingly, autonomy appeared “paradoxically” related with mortality, with high individual levels and intraindividual highly stable perceptions of autonomy being associated with a shorter residual lifetime. Thus, it seems plausible that accepting dependency and changing perceptions of autonomy over time in accordance with objectively remaining capabilities might become adaptive for survival in very old age.

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Health Differences in Advanced Old Age

Ageing and Society ◽

10.1017/s0144686x00001380 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 619-655 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Elisabeth Steinhagen-Thiessen ◽

Markus Borchelt

Keyword(s):

Old Age ◽

Functional Capacity ◽

Functional Limitations ◽

Laboratory Data ◽

Predictive Ability ◽

General Outline ◽

Very Old ◽

Old Adults ◽

Health Differences ◽

Organ Systems

AbstractThe first part of this paper provides a general outline of objectives and methods of the Internal Medicine and Geriatrics Unit of the Berlin Aging Study (BASE). Based on a multi-dimensional conceptualization of health, objective and laboratory data collected about different organ systems, e.g. cardiovascular and musculoskeletal, and functional capacity are complemented by qualitative clinical diagnoses and judgements as well as self-reported health problems and functional limitations. Some of the central questions that can be addressed using these data relate to understanding the nature and processes of differential ageing. The second part of the paper includes initial analyses of inter-individual health differences in advanced old age (70 to 105 years). Initial findings indicated that heterogeneity in somatic morbidity and functional capacity was at least as large in old adults (70 to 84 years) as in very old adults (85 to 105 years), even though higher rates of somatic morbidity and lower levels of functional capacity were observed in the very old. Chronological age and morbidity as well as psychosocial and demographic factors were found to be independent predictors of functional capacity in advanced old age. Additionally, the relative importance of psychosocial factors was found to be a function of age with lower predictive ability among the very old. In conclusion, these initial findings support the hypothesis of significant health differences in advanced old age due to differential ageing.

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Maintenance ECT in Very Old Age: Case Report

Annals of Clinical Psychiatry ◽

10.3109/10401239009149562 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 139-144 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Anthony Duncan ◽

Gabor Ungvari ◽

Robert Russell ◽

Annalise Seifert

Keyword(s):

Case Report ◽

Old Age ◽

Very Old ◽

Maintenance Ect ◽

Very Old Age

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Studying Globalization at Home

10.1093/oso/9780199964727.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Sunil Bhatia

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Lived Experience ◽

Participant Observation ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Cultural Codes ◽

Qualitative Approaches ◽

Interpretive Methods ◽

Significant Interest ◽

At Home

This chapter documents the ethnographic context in which the interviews and participant observation were conducted for the study presented in this book. It also situates the study within the context of narrative inquiry and develops arguments about the role of self-reflexivity in doing ethnography at “home” and producing qualitative forms of knowledge that are based on personal, experiential, and cultural narratives. It is argued that there is significant interest in the adoption of interpretive methods or qualitative research in psychology. The qualitative approaches in psychology present a provocative and complex vision of how the key concepts related to describing and interpreting cultural codes, social practices, and lived experience of others are suffused with both poetical and political elements of culture. The epistemological and ontological assumptions undergirding qualitative research reflect multiple “practices of inquiry” and methodologies that have different orientations, assumptions, values, ideologies, and criterion of excellence.

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Documenting Contact and Thinking with Skin: A Dermatological Approach to the Study of Police Street Checks

Canadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société ◽

10.1017/cls.2020.39 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

Anita Lam ◽

Timothy Bryan

Keyword(s):

Law Enforcement ◽

Racial Disparities ◽

Lived Experience ◽

Police Officers ◽

Qualitative Methodology ◽

Numerical Data ◽

Quantitative Studies ◽

Primary Object ◽

Practice Projects

Abstract In contrast to quantitative studies that rely on numerical data to highlight racial disparities in police street checks, this article offers a qualitative methodology for examining how histories of anti-Blackness configure civilians’ experiences of present-day policing. Taking the Halifax Street Checks Report as our primary object of analysis, we apply an innovative dermatological approach, demonstrating how skin itself becomes meaningful when police officers and civilians make contact in the process of a street check. We explore how street checks become an occasion for epidermalization, whereby a law enforcement practice projects onto the skins of civilians locally specific histories and emotions. To think with skin, we focus on the narratives shared by African Nova Scotians, a group that has been street checked at higher rates than their white counterparts. By doing so, we argue that current debates about police street checks in Halifax must attend to the emotional stakes of police-initiated encounters in order to fully appreciate the lived experience of street checks for Black civilians.

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