This volume examines the importance of time and place, as applied to aging families. In the first section, chapters focus on the temporal dimension of intergenerational relations using frameworks from human development, sociology, social history, and social psychology. The second section focuses on the social ecology of intergenerational relations in terms of the national contexts within which families are embedded. The contributors demonstrate how the social, cultural, historical, and institutional forces that orient older and younger family members toward each other in both structured and adaptive ways.

Print+CourseSmart

It is increasingly recognized that an individual's experience of old age is fundamentally influenced by their earlier life experiences. This volume of the Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of both the Life Span and the Life Course perspectives on health disparities in aging populations, examining them in the context of a changing structure of society. This volume focuses on morbidities in general as well as specific morbidities such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension, giving special attention to life-time influences on cognition and functional abilities. Finally, this new volume addresses broader policy issues with relation to Life Span and Life Course perspectives on aging. Key Features: Addresses an important topic of increasing relevance. Addresses the issue of disparities from genes to geography Presents traditional and emerging scientific perspectives

Most advanced democracies are currently experiencing accelerated population ageing, which fundamentally changes not just their demographic composition; it can also be expected to have far-reaching political and policy consequences. This volume brings together an expert set of scholars from Europe and North America to investigate generational politics and public policies within an approach explicitly focusing on comparative political science. This theoretically unified text examines changing electoral policy demands due to demographic ageing, and features analysis of USA, UK, Japan, Germany, Italy and all major EU countries. As the first sustained political science analysis of population ageing, this monograph examines both sides of the debate. It examines the actions of the state against the interests of a growing elderly voting bloc to safeguard fiscal viability, and looks at highly-topical responses such as pension cuts and increasing retirement age. It also examines the rise of ‘grey parties’, and asks what, if anything, makes such pensioner parties persist over time, in the first ever analysis of the emergence of pensioner parties in Europe. Ageing Populations in Post-Industrial Democracies will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, and to those studying electoral and social policy reform. Official publication date 1st January 2012.

Offers insights into the way in which social policies and welfare state arrangements interact with family and gender models. This title presents the research in the field, based on a variety of national and comparative sources and using different theoretical and methodological approaches.

Print+CourseSmart

Designated a Doody's Core Title! Supporting the urgent need for new patient safety guidelines and practices, Focus on Patient Safety, provides the most current and authoritative research and review to help decision makers develop new and much-needed standards and practices in nursing. With contributions from experts in the field, this new up-to-date reference focuses on key disciplines and topics that are critical to patient safety today including: Patient safety indicators Medication errors Falls and injury prevention Hospital-acquired infections Patient safety in acute-care units in hospitals Medications in the perioperative environment Home visit programs for the elderly Nursing homes Informatics issues Organizational, climate, and culture factors From new and emerging issues in patient safety to a review of research methods and measurement, this new 24th volume in the Annual Review of Nursing Research (ARNR) series continues to provide the highest standards of content and authoritative review of research for students, researchers, and clinicians.

The dominant narratives of both science and popular culture typically define aging and human development as self-contained individual matters, failing to recognize the degree to which they are shaped by experiential and contextual contingencies. Our understandings of age are thereby "boxed in" and constricted by assumptions of "normality" and naturalness that limit our capacities to explore possible alternative experiences of development and aging, and the conditions – both individual and social – that might foster such experiences. Combining foundational principles of critical social science with recent breakthroughs in research across disciplines ranging from biology to economics, this book offers a scientifically and humanly expanded landscape for apprehending the life course. Rejecting familiar but false dichotomies such as "nature vs. nurture" and "structure vs. agency", it clarifies the organismic fundamentals that make the actual content of experience so centrally important in age and development, and it also explores why attention to these fundamentals has been so resisted in studies of individuals and individual change, and in policy and practice as well. In presenting the basic principles and reviewing the current state of knowledge, Dale Dannefer introduces multi-levelled social processes that shape human development and aging over the life course and age as a cultural phenomenon – organizing his approach around three key frontiers of inquiry that each invite a vigorous exercise of sociological imagination: the Social-Structural Frontier, the Biosocial Frontier and the Critical-Reflexive Frontier.

Print+CourseSmart

How do individuals perceive the experience of aging? Can this perception predict such developmental outcomes as functional health or mortality? The 35th volume of ARGG encompasses the most current and fruitful research findings about the subjective experience of aging and describes how they fit within a theoretical framework. It reflects a new and advanced stage of development in the discipline of subjective aging and will be a building block for future theoretical and empirical work in this area of study. The book integrates presentations from a series of recent workshops attended by an international cadre of subjective aging researchers, the results of several longitudinal studies from across the globe, and theoretical propositions from studies that are ongoing. Chapters-reviewed by independent scholars for "quality control"-- address major conceptual approaches and key challenges to subjective aging research; research designs, empirical findings, and methodological issues; and the implications of subjective aging research on interventions, society, and the changing contexts of aging. Key Topics: Subjective aging and awareness of aging Connections between research on subjective aging and age stereotypes and stigma Linking subjective aging to changing social meanings of age and the life course Psychological and social resources and subjective aging across the adult life span Experimental research on age stereotypes Domain-specific approaches and implications for addressing issues of developmental regulation Subjective aging as a predictor of major endpoints of aging and development Exploring new contexts and connections for subjective aging measures Changing negative views of aging Subjective aging research from a cross-cultural perspective Subjective aging research and gerontological practice Future directions for subjective aging research