The number and relative proportion of older Native people in Canada are both increasing rapidly. So also is a social problems discourse asserting that informal care of older Native people by family and kin is traditional, and highly appropriate today. However, neither this discourse nor previous research satisfactorily address the informal care requirements of older Native people nor the gendered implications that high levels of informal care provision may have for Native caregivers. Informal care is provided to Canada's non-Native elderly people primarily by resident wives and non-resident daughters, and secondarily by husbands and sons. Data from the pan-provincial Alberta Native Seniors Study demonstrate that Native people aged 50 or more have comparatively high overall care requirements. Older Native Albertans are poor, and make extensive use of some government income support programmes. They also make moderate use of medical services. Extensive dependence on informal care, institutional barriers and local service unavailability lead Native seniors to under-utilise other formal programmes aimed generically at the older provincial population. Native seniors are much more likely to live with kin than are other Canadians. Informal care appears equally available to older women and men, and is provided chiefly by resident daughters, sons and spouses, and by non-resident daughters, sisters and sons. Extensive elderly caregiving requirements may impose a growing, double burden on many, who are also providing care for dependent children. Without further support, current and future requirements may significantly limit the options of caregiving women and men.

In spite of the many studies conducted over the past decades, the field of inquiry known as cross-cultural gerontology remains atheoretical. This is because of its shortcomings in generating culturally-relevant theoretical frameworks of its own. In this article, I address this failure and adapt Kluckhohn's model of value orientations for use in the study of ageing-related concepts. I discuss possible applications of the adapted model and, in particular, its application to one of the most frequently debated concepts in gerontology, successful ageing. In the light of this discussion, I conclude that the culturally-relevant theoretical framework hereby proposed could lead to the rectification of the current atheoretical predicament of cross-cultural gerontology.

Survey evidence on the living conditions of older people has a long and creditable history in Britain. Booth's work alerted policy makers to the often dire circumstances of older people, and accounts of their housing, diet, domestic arrangements and general quality of life stiffened resolve to ensure an adequate minimum standard of living in old age. At the start of what has been termed the welfare state, there were two important studies of old age in the works of Rowntree and Sheldon. In their depiction of the lives of independent elderly people, they provided a useful mid-century benchmark on progress.

The question of income and support infrastructure recurs over the decades and, in many ways, these concerns are central to the question of adequate diets with implications for health and wellbeing. The possibility, or otherwise, of being able to afford, buy and prepare food which is of appropriate nutritional and social quality, is fundamental to an independent life in old age. Using food as a focus for review, this article maps what has been said about the circumstances of independent elderly people and what has been done to support them in the community. It is concluded that while considerable progress has been made over the century, their relative position remains problematic. This is especially the case for those living on their own in old age and with a reliance on the basic state pension.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of social isolation in the context of service provision to older people. It draws on in-depth interviews with 18 Australian aged care practitioners about their perceptions of social isolation among their clients. The findings show that service providers experience significant levels of concern and frustration and a sense of powerlessness in meeting the needs of such clients. In analysing these accounts, the identification and management of isolation is conceptualised as a social practice which occurs in specific relational settings. The provision of care to lonely, isolated old people is structurally constrained in two ways. First, because of inadequate public resource allocation, the relationship between practitioners and older clients is dominated by time pressure and instrumentality. Secondly, the organisational and professional rules which service providers are required to follow shape the interpersonal relations between practitioner and client in ways which negatively impact on the outcomes of care for both.

Recent literature on intergenerational relations – although giving different explanations – suggests that the giving of money and services to children reinforces the receiving of money and services by elderly people. To explore the flow of support between the generations we present evidence about the type and intensity of the help that elderly people receive from their adult children and their families. By comparing five developed countries we examine whether the amount of family help transferred to older people is shaped by a ‘crowding out’ process, in which more generous welfare systems displace family solidarity. Taking co-residence into account the international comparison does not support the crowding out hypothesis. We then show that the giving of services by older people to their adult children increases the probability that they receive help from them. This indirectly supports the reverse hypothesis, namely that the relationship between the state and the family may be described as a process of ‘crowding in’: generous welfare systems which give resources to elderly people help to increase rather than undermine family solidarity.

The hallmark of sociology is its emphases on first, people, secondly, structures and, thirdly, their interrelationships. Similarly, we see sociological research on age as concerned with (1) people over their life course; (2) age-related structures and institutions; and (3) the dynamic interplay between people and structures as each influences the other. Guided by our ‘aging and society paradigm’, we review the research legacy as it has focused more on (1) than on (2), and is only now concerned with understanding the interplay between them (3). Hence our challenge to future researchers is to devise strategies for understanding and analysing this interplay and its possible contributions to the ever-accumulating research legacy.

As the ‘aging and society’ paradigm examines structure in its own right, it should have an immediate appeal to sociologists. On the one hand it can be seen as a schematic for gerontology or research on human development and, on the other, as a theory or paradigm in its own right. I see the various parts and phases of the paradigm as a learning process, where stopping somewhere half-way is risky: one has to go the whole hog before really prospering from its logic.

To focus on individuals and social change together requires analyses that, in the words of Hardy and Waite (1997), can assess the nature and temporal patterns of individual behaviour, while simultaneously attending to the manner in which this behaviour is enclosed in different organisational structures that are themselves changing, whether synchronically or asynchronically.

The Rileys have always reminded us of the dangers of neglecting structure, or of treating it as a mere contextual characteristic in people's lives, particularly in the form of life course reductionism. In addition, however, the temporal aspects of structures are important. There is a risk in using solely the various social situations of different cohorts as the basis of analysis. Mere comparison with an older cohort causes the ‘surrounding structure’ to appear too static. The explanation or understanding of a phenomenon consequently stops half-way. We must also remember that the cohort concept, as well as chronological age, serves as a proxy measure for attitudes and behaviours that actually carry the effect and provide theoretically meaningful interpretation.

Koenig, H. G., George, L. K. and Peterson, B. L. 1998. Religiosity and remission of depression in medically ill older adults. American Journal of Psychiatry 155:4, 536–42.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia 1997, 276pp, $29.95 cloth ISBN 0-8139-1721-2.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is one of America's 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 Gullette's 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.