Most social research on ageing in Asia has focused on the support provided by adult children to their parents, and thereby suggests that as a matter of course older people are in need of support. This paper offers a different perspective. Drawing on ethnographic and quantitative data from a village in East Java, it examines the extent of older people's dependence on others and highlights the material and practical contributions that they make to their families. It is shown that only a minority of older people are reliant on children or grandchildren for their daily survival. In the majority of cases, the net flow of inter-generational support is either downwards – from old to young – or balanced. Far from merely assisting with childcare and domestic tasks, older people are often the economic pillars of multi-generational families. Pension and agricultural incomes serve to secure the livelihoods of whole family networks, and the accumulated wealth of older parents is crucial for launching children into economic independence and underwriting their risks. Parental generosity does not generally elicit commensurate reciprocal support when it is needed, leaving many people vulnerable towards the end of their lives.

Empirical studies in several disciplines including sociology, psychology and communications science have investigated images of older people in the mass media, but analyses to date have failed systematically to apply gerontological concepts and to compare the portrayal of old age with ‘real-world’ evidence. A model of older people's internal and external resources was used to assess the portrayal of older people in prime-time television drama series. Three hours of programmes broadcast over six weeks in 2001 of 32 prime-time television series on the four German networks with the largest market shares were examined. The age of 355 portrayed characters were estimated, and the socio-economic, health-related and psychological resources of the 30 characters rated as 60 years or older were assessed. Observational categories and rating dimensions were developed on the basis of the resource model. Older people were heavily under-represented, especially women and those of advanced old age. Furthermore, the representation of older people's social participation and financial resources was overly positive. Finally, older women and men were portrayed in traditional gender roles. The antecedents and consequences of the biased portrayals (of old and young people) are discussed from a psychological perspective.

Adult incontinence violates social norms and values and undermines the personal expectation of being independent, dry and clean. Urinary incontinence is widely known to have a psychological impact on elderly people. This paper reports the findings of a study of the impact of incontinence on a convenience sample of older people in Hong Kong. Several of the results concur with those of studies in western countries. It was found that the prevalence of urinary incontinence increased with adult age, and that the condition affected women more than men. Over half of both men and women respondents had suffered for less than three years. It appeared that the period of suffering was not strongly associated with the level of incontinence. There were no significant differences between the duration and the level of incontinence, or between health status and years of suffering. About 80 per cent of the incontinent respondents had negative psychological impacts. There were significant differences between the sexes in the impact of urinary incontinence as indicated by the following items: elderly men found incontinence more stressful than their women counterparts; and elderly men more often strove to hide their incontinence from their friends. In summary, older men reported more negative psychological effects than older women. This study is not able to conclude that the psychological suffering of those who reported more negative effects is greater than that of those who reported fewer.

This paper presents, analyses and interprets expressions of the experience of advanced old age based upon the concepts of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. During 1990, 262 older residents of the city of Jyväskylä in central Finland were interviewed. They were born in 1910 and aged 80 years 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 and 10 women) were tape-recorded. A five-year follow-up was carried out with the same cohort in 1995, when 17 of the original sub-sample of 20 were still alive. Unlike five years previously, most of the narrators said they had now crossed the line into old age. At the ten-year follow-up in 2000, six women and four men were still alive to describe their experience at 90 years of age. Collective history and objective structures had provided a common foundation for my narrators' notions of the world – of right and wrong and of good and bad. Over their lifetime, this socio-cultural background had gradually changed, and they perceived the changes. Moreover, in the earlier stages of the study, they voiced criticisms of these changes. At age 90 years, however, they no longer criticised society or its people. By this time, it seems they felt they had completed the mission of living a life.

This study examines the mediating role of psychological resources on life satisfaction, an indicator of subjective wellbeing. The evidence identifies several life events and changing circumstances that can be potentially detrimental to the wellbeing of older adults. Based on the literature, a theoretical model was developed with the hypothesis that adaptation to potentially adverse events draws on psychological resources central to the self. The study participants were a random sample of 423 community-dwelling people aged 70 years and over. All respondents were interviewed in their own homes using a structured schedule. Quantitative data were obtained on age, gender, social support, marital status, physical functioning, bodily pain, loneliness, isolation and housing difficulties. Subjective well-being was assessed by the life satisfaction index, and the psychological mediator was conceptualised as a measure of environmental mastery. The first round of analyses found that variations in well-being were associated with housing difficulties, isolation, loneliness, physical functioning, pain, support networks and marital status. The full model established perfect mediation by environmental mastery occurred for the variables housing problems and physical functioning, and partial mediation occurred for the variable loneliness – supporting the original hypothesis. The results add to the evidence from an increasing number of studies that demonstrates how psychological resources underlie the processes of adaptation to the changing situations that accompany increasing age and prevent negative outcomes.

Narratives of ageing are an important theme in both medical sociology and the sociology of the body. Research on representations of the ageing body typically draws upon such subjects as the paintings of Rembrandt or Victorian literature. In this paper, however, the aim is to demonstrate that some of J. M. W. Turner's pictures contain insightful narratives on ageing, the vulnerability of the body and the nature of our shared humanity. Turner (1775–1851) is widely regarded as Britain's greatest painter and one of the world's great artists. I contend that the central principle of Turner's Romantic art is the arousal of sensation. Although Turner is generally revered as a painter of landscape rather than ‘the body’, the paper maintains that many of Turner's paintings can be read as studies in the vulnerability of the body. It will be shown, for example, that many of Turner's pictures are wonderfully evocative ‘visual poems’ on the universal human experiences of loss, decline, ‘the fallacies of hope’, grief, ageing and death. This paper is, therefore, a cultural case study of ‘the decline narrative’ of ageing.

Gerontologists have recognised the important influence of leisure activity on the mental and physical health of older adults. To date, however, there have been few studies of the patterns of participation in leisure activity among older adults in Hong Kong. This study examines a large representative sample of Hong Kong older adults and the associations between their socio-economic and health characteristics and their leisure activities. The data are from a cross-sectional survey of 2,180 respondents aged 60 or more years, conducted in 2000 by the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department. There were full records for 2,144 respondents. Among the participation rates in the seven categories of leisure activities, watching television or listening to radio was the highest, while the lowest was for playing mahjong or cards. The characteristics that significantly correlated with the level of participation differed by the activity. Although no consistent pattern emerged, gender, education, employment status, receiving welfare benefits, self-rated health and functional impairment were the strongest correlates for most types of leisure activity. The paper is concluded by comparing the results with previous findings, and by discussing the service implications of the findings, the limitations of the study, and directions for future research.