Age and Ageing

Question 1

What is age?

Answer 1

‘age is a concept which is assumed to refer to a biological reality. However, the meaning and experience of age, and the process of ageing, is subject to historical and cultural processes…both youth and childhood have had and continue to have different meanings depending on young people’s social, cultural and political circumstances’ (Vyn and White, 1997)

Question 2

Different conceptions of age

Answer 2

Chronological age – measured in years
Physiological/biological age – capability of body
Social age – age as a social construct

Question 3

Discrimination

Answer 3

The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex (OED)

Question 4

Age Discrimination

Answer 4

60% of older people in the UK agree that age discrimination exists in the daily lives of older people. AgeUK, 2015

Question 5

Geographies of age: Different approaches

Answer 5

1 – Geographical gerontology – e.g. demography, health, distribution of housing, older people’s experiences of care
2 – Questioning how age is socially and culturally constructed → not a fixed path that each individual experiences in the same way
3 – Gendered old age → how do age and gender jointly structure people’s use of space?
4 – Care and ageing

Question 6

Laws 1991 - Spatial construction of old age

Answer 6

‘the material spaces and places in which we live, work, and engage in leisure activities are age-graded and, in turn, age is associated with particular places and spaces. Our metaphorical social position also varies with increasing age as old age is peripheralized into discrete locations, while “youth is everywhere”

Question 7

How do we experience age - bodily charactersitics

Answer 7

1 – Physical frailty
2 – Physical appearance of the face and body
3 – Physical ability
Mowl et al (2000)

Question 8

Social class and age

Answer 8

Social class has a strong influence on constructions of old age and individual’s identification with these

Question 9

Social construction of age

Answer 9

• ‘negative depictions of growing old have been fueled by the medicalization of the ageing body’ (Powell and Owen, 2005)
• ‘third age’ – emerging life stage that represents new possibilities for personal identity through consumption and choice (Phoenix and Smith, 2011)

Question 10

Active ageing

Answer 10

• Idea designed to change our views, understandings, stereotypes etc. around ageing
• Highlight and facilitate the active contribution older people might make in society.

Question 11

Katz, 2000

Answer 11

‘the aged subject becomes encased in a social matrix where moral, disciplinary conventions around activity, health and independent appear to represent an idealized old age’

Question 12

Geographies of ageing: care

Answer 12

‘when care services enter the home, particularly when adaptive or medical equipment is involved, it is anticipated that established meanings and routinized activities that constitute the lived home will be disturbed’ (Dyck et al, 2005)

Question 13

Vulnerability of bodily safety and care

Answer 13

• Vulnerability of physical body tied to waiting for an attendant to look after her needs
• Care involves ultimate invasion of privacy
• Dependent on others to organize her space so she can look after herself when alone

Question 14

Gender and Ageing: Masculinities

Answer 14

‘Social geographers recognize that both masculinities and old age are diverse and are multiply and spatially produced but have rarely considered how they intersect to construct multiple masculinities and diverse experiences of ageing for men in a variety of everyday localities
Tarrant, 2013

Question 15

Older Men in later life

Answer 15

• Old men found to be avoiding public life and being more vulnerable to isolation e.g. Davidson, Daly and Arber, 2003)

Question 16

Grandparenting as a role

Answer 16

Grandparenting is ‘a role and identity in which old men negotiate the intersections of age and masculinities’ (Mann 2007

Question 17

Pain, 2000 - leisure spaces

Answer 17

• Leisure spaces are an important social arena in which dominant ageist discourses are constructed, reinforced, and challenged.
• The values and social meanings the sites embody through the cultural, economic and historical construction of place makes them symbolic of ageing

Question 18

Working class men in a changing culture

Answer 18

• At present in north-east England a generation of working-class men have been forced into early retirement and new forms of tate and familial economic dependency.
• These changes have been felt in a group with strong masculinist tradition of heavy manual labour, and a distinct gender division of labour wherein women may have worked outside the home during their lives but their primary role in homemakers. Pain, 2000

Question 19

Tarrant, 2010 did a study on

Answer 19

Evidence collected from current research project – 30 semi structured interviews of grandfathers from Lancaster, aged 51 to 88 over a 12 month period.

Question 20

Tarrant, 2010 found

Answer 20

that relationships with grandchildren are not only interested by space and place but also form an important part of the ways in which people who are grandparents live and experience their lives and construct their identities.
- Grandparents reflect how intimate relationships are maintained and re-introduced over the lifecourses and have different meanings for the older generations.

Question 21

Tarrant, 2010 the positive of grandparenting

Answer 21

• The grandfathers, revealed how their grandchildren made them feel young in interactions with them, which contributed to a positive construction of an aged identity.
• The grandparents who lived close to their grandchildren described having frequent contact and interaction with them and in most cases it was clear that their children relied on them for child care and support (Wheelock and Jones, 2002

Question 22

Technology influence between age generations

Answer 22

Technologies are important social spaces because they shift power balance between grandparents and grandchildren, particularly now that young people tend to be more competent and knowledgable than their older counterparts (Wilk , 2000)

Question 23

Moral panics

Answer 23

For at least a century, recurrent moral panics or crises have been constructed around youth subcultures (Pearson, 1983).

Question 24

the assumption of ageism

Answer 24

Bytheway (1995) has suggested that: ageism assumes that people who share a chronological age have other things in common, ageism is a wide-ranging and shifting ideology which can affect people of any chronological age; and ageism cannot be understood simply as a parallel to racism or sexism – ageism is one form of discrimination which everyone suffers at certain times.

Question 25

One positive identity of old age is

Answer 25

of active and fulfilling retirement where older people can expect to be physically fit and healthy by retirement and, if affluent, may pursue leisure activities which were traditionally the preserve of the young.

Question 26

Chronological age - Pain et al, 2011

Answer 26

Number of years lived. Every country has statutory age barriers which delimit our identification of age groups. Vast numbers of older people are excluded from earning simply because of their chronological age.

Question 27

Physiological age - Pain et al, 2011

Answer 27

• This involves the health, fitness and visible appearance of the body.
• We frequently judge and label others on this basis.
• There is growing pressure to defy or alter the bodily signs of ageing because stereotypes about older people as intellectually, socially and economically redundant are embodied or closely associated with declining mental and physical health.

Question 28

Social age - Pain et al, 2011

Answer 28

generally held beliefs and attitudes about the capability of people of different ages and the social and spatial behavior, which is appropriate for them.