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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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The experience of ageing and advanced old age
— a ten-year follow-up | | Author(s) | Riitta-Liisa Heikkinen |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 24, part 4, July 2004 |
| Pages | pp 567-582 |
| Source | http://journals.cambridge.org/ |
| Keywords | Octogenarians ; Nonagenarians ; Ageing process ; Social characteristics [elderly] ; Attitude ; Longitudinal surveys ; Finland. |
| Annotation | The concepts of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger are used to analyse and interpret expressions of the experience of advanced old age. 262 older residents of Jyväskylä, an city in central Finland, were interviewed in 1990. These participants were born in 1910 and aged 80 at the time. In addition to collecting epidemiological data, the narrative stories on the ageing experience of a sub-sample of 20 respondents (10 men, 10 women) were tape-recorded. A 5-year follow-up was carried out with the same cohort in 1995, when 17 of the original sub-sample were still alive. Unlike five years previously, most of the narrators said they had now crossed the line into old age. At the 10-year follow-up in 2000, 6 women and 4 men were still alive to describe their experience at age 90. Collective history and objective structures had provided a common foundation for their notions of the world - of right and wrong, and good and bad. Over their lifetime, the socio-cultural background had gradually changed, and they perceived the changes. While in the earlier stages of the study, they voiced criticisms of these changes, at age 90, they no longer criticised society or its people. By this time, it seems they felt they had completed their mission of living a life. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-040716004 A |
| Classmark | BBM: BBR: BG: F: DP: 3J: 76L |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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