Busy Ethic: A Validation of a Popular Concept.

Background And Objectives: The busy ethic for retirement, as proposed by Ekerdt (1986), is a prescriptive norm that esteems an occupied, active lifestyle. This research is a first attempt to measure the busy ethic in a standardized way and apply it to a population-based sample. Objectives are: to examine whether a busy ethic is affirmed by retirees; to test busy ethic endorsement by different segments of the retired population; and to examine whether endorsement is associated with selected activities.

Retirement preparedness: A study of gender, marital status, and motivation factors by using a theory of planned behavior model.

Although working men and women share common retirement concerns, women encounter unique challenges in securing their retirement. These challenges arise from factors such as part-time work, intermittent work histories, and potential wealth disparities. Marital status also exerts a profound influence on retirement decisions.

The Fourth Age in Prospect.

Objectives: Higgs and Gilleard (2015) have uniquely theorized the fourth age as a "social imaginary" of deep old age that blends notions of frailty, abjection, and the moral relations of care. This report evaluates the coherence and reach of the fourth-age imaginary among older adults in relative good health.

Methods: In a qualitative design and within samples at 5 sites (in Czechia, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States), 138 adults aged 70+ and still living independently discussed what it would mean to be "not independent" in later life.

What will you do with all that time? Changes in leisure activities after retirement are determined by age-related self-views and preparation.

Retirement is a normative life transition that liberates the individual from the external obligations of employment, being a catalyzer of leisure activity engagement. However, the individual's motivations to engage in leisure activities in the time that is gained after retirement may depend on their future self-views (i.e.

What We Need to Know About Retirement: Pressing Issues for the Coming Decade.

The current landscape of retirement is changing dramatically as population aging becomes increasingly visible. This review of pressing retirement issues advocates research on (a) changing meanings of retirement, (b) impact of technology, (c) the role of housing in retirement, (d) human resource strategies, (e) adjustment to changing retirement policies, (f) the pension industry, and (g) the role of ethnic diversity in retirement.

The dog that didn't bark: The challenge of cross-cultural qualitative research on aging.

The paper addresses the problem of cultural proximity in qualitative cross-cultural research on aging, presenting insights into a methodology of systematic 'estrangement'. Based on interdisciplinary research on the social time orientations of elderly people in Germany, Hong Kong, and the US, we discuss the question of how shared identities and taken-for-granted assumptions may bias the findings in comparative aging studies. With Alfred Schütz's phenomenological concept of 'lifeworld' as a methodological device, we focus on the issue of the diverging 'systems of relevance' that each of the national project teams obviously referred to when gathering and interpreting the data.

Is longevity a value for older adults?

Longevity is an aspiration at the population level, a goal of public health policy and research. In the later decades of life, longevity goals also deserve scrutiny at the personal level to understand whether people welcome longer lives. Contradictory preferences could be expected, both the embrace of longevity and hesitation.

Residential Reasoning and the Tug of the Fourth Age.

Purpose Of The Study: Where to grow older occupies the minds of many aging adults. This study examines how anticipation of the fourth age influences third-age residential reasoning. It also investigates the role of social relationships in choosing housing for later life.

Possession divestment by sales in later life.

Residential relocation in later life is almost always a downsizing, with many possessions to be divested in a short period of time. This article examines older movers' capacities for selling things, and ways that selling attenuates people's ties to those things, thus accomplishing the human dis-possession of the material convoy. In qualitative interviews in 79 households in the Midwestern United States, older adults reported their experience with possession sales associated with residential relocation.

The reproduction of gender norms through downsizing in later life residential relocation.

Using data collected from qualitative interviews in 36 households, this article examines people's use of social relations based on gender to perform tasks associated with residential relocation in later life. Without prompting, our respondents addressed the social relations of gender in the meanings of things, in the persons of gift recipients, and in the persons of actors accomplishing the tasks. They matched gender-typed objects to same-sex recipients, reproducing circumstances of possession and passing on expectations for gender identity.

Gerontology in Five Images.

In his Kent Award lecture, Scott Bass called for a greater coherence of gerontology. This article proposes that the teaching of gerontology is one way to address the centrifugal tendencies of the field and economize its disciplinary sprawl. The instructional strategy is to concentrate attention to a limited number of focal visuals from which the exposition of gerontological knowledge can radiate out and to which it can circle back.

The material convoy after age 50.

Objectives: Possessions constitute a dynamic "material convoy" that accumulates across adulthood to furnish role enactments and the development of the self. Following a familiar life course arc, older people should hypothetically release the possessions that equipped the daily lives that they no longer have.

Method: We use new survey data on possession divestment from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study to assess activity on behalf of the material convoy after age 50.

Safe passage of goods and self during residential relocation in later life.

Techniques of possession research among older people tend to accentuate their prizing of things and their use of special dispositions to achieve the protection or 'safe passage' of things as they transfer to a new owner. Such efforts on behalf of possessions may also be undertaken to perpetuate the self. To study the care of things and self in a wider context, we examined older people's repertoire of disposition strategies during episodes of household relocation and downsizing.

Job satisfaction in birth cohorts of nurses.

Aim: The aim of the present study was to investigate which hospital, unit and individual characteristics predict job satisfaction in four age cohorts of registered nurses (RNs).

Background: Adequate supply of direct care nurses in hospitals is paramount to the provision of safe patient care. While recruitment is important, interventions to retain experienced nurses in the work force should also be undertaken.

Perceived benefits of VFW post participation for older adults.

Older adults, as active members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), describe multiple benefits of participation in the organization to their overall well-being. This qualitative study examined the perspectives of 20 active participants of a VFW Post and its Ladies Auxiliary. Findings indicate that, for the study participants, the VFW serves as a primary source of cross-generational influence, emotional support, and meaningful activity and provides a safe and secure environment for members.

Confronting the Material Convoy in Later Life.

We adapt a metaphor from life course studies to designate the whole of one's possessions, across time, as a convoy of material support. This dynamic collection of things supports daily life and the self, but it can also present difficulty in later life. To alleviate the purported burdens of the material convoy, a discourse has arisen that urges elders and their family members to reduce the volume of possessions.

Older adults' expectations to move: do they predict actual community-based or nursing facility moves within 2 years?

Objective: This study examined the relationship between older adults' expectations to move and actual residential relocation in the community or to a nursing facility within 2 years.

Method: Two waves of data (2000, 2002) from the Health and Retirement Study were used to compare expectations with subsequent moves. Logistic regression techniques were used to analyze the association between decision outcomes and expectations to move, health and functioning, physical environment, informal supports, and formal services.

Frontiers of research on work and retirement.

The shifting boundary between work and retirement and the always-emergent features of retirement practice create a wide opportunity for scholarship and research. After an overview of the scope of retirement research, this article articulates 4 areas that deserve special attention in the present historical circumstance: studies of the form and timing of retirement exits, the labor market for older workers, the quality of pensions, and the experience of retired life. The field should be wary of prescribing regimes of behavior for late careers and retirement that many people are unsuited to fulfill.

Motives for residential mobility in later life: post-move perspectives of elders and family members.

This qualitative study delineates motives for residential mobility, describes dynamics between the elder and family members during the move decision process, and locates the move decision within ecological layers of the aging context. Interviews were conducted with 30 individuals and couples (ages 60-87) who experienced a community-based move within the past year, and with 14 extended family members. Reasons for moving (from perspectives of both elders who moved and their family members) were grouped into four themes and eleven issues that influenced the move decision.

Measurement of late-life residential relocation: why are rates for such a manifest event so varied?

Objectives: This methods article examines how characteristics of residential relocation (e.g., housing type) and research design decisions (e.

Family things: Attending the household disbandment of older adults.

When adults move to smaller quarters in later life, family members become involved in the management and disposal of possessions-some cherished, some mundane. Interviews were conducted with 14 family members who had participated in a household disbandment by elders. This qualitative analysis describes the various tasks that were undertaken by family members; how family members asserted themselves in the process; how they were an outlet for possessions; the way that some possessions are shared; and implications for family's story about itself.

Assisted living: a place to manage uncertainty. The ambiguity of assisted living is unavoidable because residents' needs are always changing. The Wheat Valley example is used to examine this concept.

The assisted living environment lacks the satisfying clarity of the consumer model (a stay at the Holiday Inn) or the medical model (the hospital or nursing home). Yet the ambiguity of assisted living is unavoidable because it shelters individuals whose needs are changing, the model of care requires extensive negotiation with residents, and staff members must continually compromise as they implement the principles. Assisted living is a place where uncertainty is managed, not resolved.

Household disbandment in later life.

Objective: This study described activities that older people undertake to reduce the volume of their possessions in the course of a residential move to smaller quarters, a process with practical, cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions.

Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted with members of 30 households who had moved in the prior year. The disbandment period, typically lasting about 2 months, was a particular focus of the interview.