Mike Hepworth

On loss of activity and independence, adaptation improves life satisfaction in old age : a qualitative study of patients' perceptions

The purpose was to improve the understanding of factors are perceived by elderly people as important for their life satisfaction, during and after rehabilitation. Fifteen persons aged 80–94 years were interviewed while in hospital and on two follow-up occasions after discharge. Assessment of motor function using the General Motor Function assessment scale was used for descriptive purposes. Three themes emerged as important for life satisfaction: activity, independence and adaptation. Activity and independence were considered significant for life satisfaction. Basic activity preferences were related to care of one’s own body and to social contacts. Control and influence over help and services were regarded as important. Different strategies for adaptation to the consequences of disease were used: reorganisation, interaction with caregivers, mental adaptation and mental activities (used as pastime and escape). Those with declined motor functions limited their activity preferences. A key finding was that pleasant past memories were actively recalled in an effort to achieve current life satisfaction. This adaptation strategy created a sense of life satisfaction, however with a potential risk for concealing dissatisfaction with conditions that might otherwise be correctable. Strategies for improving life satisfaction among old people in rehabilitation are suggested.

Continuity of the Self in Later Life: Perceptions of Informal Caregivers

The authors explore perceptions of informal caregivers of extremely elderly (80+) relatives or friends regarding the purpose of caregiving, including factors they considered important for the life satisfaction of the care recipients. They collected data mainly through qualitative interviewed and employed symbolic interactionism. The results revealed a general purpose of the informal caregiving: protection of the care recipient’s self. This purpose was a significant aspect of the identified caregiving categories—social-emotional, proxy, and instrumental care—and the authors consider all four factors important for the care recipients’ life satisfaction: activity, independence, and environmental and adaptive factors. Some informal caregivers gave forceful encouragement to care recipients in an attempt to get them to accept formal care and move to sheltered accommodation. This study underscores the value of informal caregiving and that the caregiving interaction should be balanced by reciprocity.

The midlifestyle of George and Lynne: notes on a popular strip

’George and Lynne’ is a comic strip which appears each day in one of Britain’s most popular newspapers, The Sun. The central characters are an affluent married couple living in a spacious house on the banks of a river. George has an executive (though unspecified) position with a commercial organisation and Lynne, who has no children to look after, stays at home. They have a large number of friends, plenty of clothes and other material possessions, and enjoy a happy marriage and active social life. As portrayed in the strip their lifestyle, as we shall see below, is an expression of contemporary consumer culture and in particular a celebration of the naked (or almost naked) human body (Featherstone 1982).

In defiance of an ageing culture

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife . Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia 1997, 276pp,

‘The changes and chances of this mortal life’: aspects of ageing in the fiction of Stanley Middleton

29.95 cloth ISBN 0-8139-1721-2. Margaret Morganroth Gullette is one of Americas foremost critics of the concept of ageing as a universal and comprehensive process of decline which begins in the middle years. She is a formidable critic of biological essentialism, defender of social constructionism, and opponent of ‘middle ageism’. Her most recent book, published in 1997 and not yet available in the UK, has been widely acclaimed in the USA. This review article describes Gullettes analysis of the social construction of decline in the context of her previous writings on midlife and outlines her strategy for combatting the decline model of ageing into old age.

Reviews : Paul Spencer (ed.), Anthropology and the Riddle of the Sphinx: paradoxes of change in the life course. London: Routledge, 1991. paper £14.99, xii + 222 pp:

Sociological research shows that individuals attempt to make sense of the meaning of the ageing process in the course of conversations with other people. The social construction of ageing is therefore an interactive process during which ideas and beliefs about ageing are negotiated and exchanged. Novels are a rich and easily accessible source of data on the social construction of the meaning of ageing during the course of social interaction and this paper explores the imaginative contribution of the English novelist Stanley Middleton to our awareness of these subtle processes. It is suggested that Middletons fiction provides a particularly rewarding example of the contribution of the novelist to our understanding of the origins of the experience of growing older as a product of social interaction.

The body: social process and cultural theory

way of the Other and one’s infinite answerability has directly led to the non-simultaneous relationship which the later texts by Derrida entertain with Heidegger. This non-simultaneity effectively deconstructs the very genealogy of deconstruction itself, permitting the ethical principle of thinking beyond the thematizable correlative to continue within and sustain the real, athetical, work of deconstruction. If this is so, and Rapaport’s book shows convincingly that it is, then the time of deconstruction, contrary to rumours, is perhaps only beginning.