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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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'Old but not that old'
— Finnish community-dwelling people aged 90+ negotiating their autonomy | | Author(s) | Jari Pirhonen, Hanna Ojala, Kirsi Lumme-Sandt, Ikkea Pietila |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 36, no 8, September 2016 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, September 2016 |
| Pages | pp 1625-1644 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Nonagenarians ; Living in the community ; Attitude ; Independence ; Self care capacity ; Evaluation ; Finland. |
| Annotation | Autonomy is a pervasive concept in Western lifestyles today. However, people in the fourth age are assumed not to be autonomous, but dependent on other people. The dataset for this study is part of the Vitality 90+ study, consisting of interviews with Finnish community-dwelling people aged 90 or 91 (born in 1921 or 1922). The study aimed to examine how these people see their own autonomy in their everyday lives, based on membership categorisation analysis. Respondents considered their autonomy through three distinct themes. Functional ability was considered in terms of being physically capable of managing daily tasks. Independence in decision making was based on material and financial self-sufficiency, and on the respondents' supposition that they were capable of making decisions due to an absence of memory disorders. Additionally, autonomy was considered as contesting norms of age-appropriateness. Among respondents, chronological age seemed to have been replaced by functional and cognitive ability as a definer of categorisations. The study revealed that the perceptions of autonomy also included gendered features, as they were linked with differing gendered ideals, roles and life domains of women and men. The results highlight the internal diversity among the oldest old and challenge the third/fourth age division. Instead, they suggest the existence of a certain 'grey area' within old age, and urge an analysis on the subtle meaning making involved in older people's constructions of age-categorisations. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-160820203 A |
| Classmark | BBR: K4: DP: C3: CA: 4C: 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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