Understanding how to improve the physical and cognitive accessibility of visitor economy businesses and organisations wanting to offer nature-based outdoor pursuits for people with dementia is key to supporting their inclusion and agency. The aim of this qualitative study was to understand the experiences, needs and preferences of people with dementia participating in nature-based outdoor pursuits in their leisure time. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 people with dementia and 15 family members and subjected to thematic analysis. Four themes related to inclusion for people with dementia and their family members reflected diversity in individual needs and preferences for engaging with nature-based outdoor pursuits, their own adaptations to maintain access including accommodating risk, how cognitive and physical accessibility can be supported by businesses, and which practical and psychosocial barriers prevent inclusion. Learning from people with dementia and their family members has helped bridge the gap to their inclusion in nature-based outdoor pursuits. Their insights will inform the development of such pursuits by businesses and organisations as well as future work into risk decision-making.

While health inequalities among older people have long been a research focus and are now high on policy agendas in developed societies, they have often been neglected in less developed ones, despite them experiencing rapid population ageing since the turn of the century. Using data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) cohort study (N = 63,578), this paper measures the health status of older people using the Quality of Well-Being scale, and estimates time trends in health inequality with concentration indices, followed by an investigation of their social determinants. Its specific focus is health care accessibility (HA) in the period 2005–2018, when China experienced an unprecedented advance in health-related social policy reform. The analysis reveals pro-rich inequalities in health among older people, but also shows that these have narrowed gradually over the past two decades, which is largely attributable to greater equity in access to health care. Within this general trend of inequality reduction, however, the role of HA has declined and social determinants such as education now have an increasing influence on health inequalities. These findings suggest that social policies targeting not only health improvements among older people but also health inequalities earlier in the life course are required if policy makers want to promote health equity in later life.

There is a need for new imaginaries of care and social health for people living with dementia at home. Day programmes are one ‘care in the community’ solution that requires further theorisation to ensure that its empirical base can usefully guide policy. In this paper we contribute to theorising day programmes through an ethnographic case study of one woman living with dementia at home using a day programme. We collected data through observations, interviews and artefacts. We observed Peg, whose case story is central in this paper, over 9 months for a total of 61 hours at the day programme, as well as during 16 hours of observation at her home and 2 community outings. We use a material semiotic approach to thinking about the day programme as a health ‘technology in practice’ to challenge the taken-for-granted ideas of day programmes as neutral, stable, bounded spaces. Peg’s case story is illustrative of how a day programme and its scripts come into relation with an arrangement of family care and life at home with dementia. At times the configuration of this arrangement works to provide a sort of stabilising distribution of care and space to allow Peg and her family to go on in the day-to-day life with dementia. At other times the arrangement may create limits to the care made possible. We argue that how we conceptualise and study day programmes and their relations to home and the broader care infrastructure affects the possibilities of care they can enact.

Public health crises like Covid-19 profoundly influence informal care-givers of older adults with functional health limitations. This study deepens existing understanding of care-giving processes during the pandemic to uncover insights useful for developing effective care-giving interventions for the post-pandemic era and future public health crises. Specifically, it examined (1) how care-giving activities during the pandemic impacted care-giver psychological wellbeing by affecting caregiving burden and the positive aspects of caregiving and (2) the moderating effect of pandemic-specific factors (i.e., care recipients’ unmet health-care needs due to the pandemic). Multiple-group analyses were conducted on data on 906 informal care-givers of older adults with functional health limitations, obtained from the Covid-19 Supplement and Round 10 Survey of the National Health and Aging Trends Study conducted in the United States. The mean age of participants was approximately 60 years, and most were white women. Positive aspects of care-giving significantly mediated the relationships between providing assistance in activities of daily living (ADL), instrumental ADL, and emotional support and positive affect. Care-giving burden significantly mediated the relationship between assistance in ADL and positive and negative affect. Care recipients’ unmet health-care needs moderated the relationships between assistance in ADL and burden, assistance in ADL and negative affect, and emotional support and positive affect. In sum, this study underscores the positive aspects of care-giving as well as care-giving burden and demonstrates that greater attention should be paid to care-givers caring for individuals with unmet health-care needs during public health crises. The results suggest that more-effective responses to public health crises must be developed, especially within health-care systems.

Research on social robots in dementia care has focused on their effects, for example in relation to the patients’ wellbeing or the care-givers’ working environment. Such approaches to social robots treat them as stable objects with a singular function. Combining social gerontology with social studies of science, the current study offers a new angle by asking: How do patients and care-givers in care homes for older people establish a shared definition of the situation in interactions involving robot animals? Drawing on ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis of 211 minutes of video recordings in two care homes in Sweden, we demonstrate the embodied work by which participants in interactions establish activities with robot animals. In contrast to the ideal of transparency in social robotics, we show that a central affordance of the robots is their vagueness, which allows for their inclusion in playful interactions. Playful framings of the robots highlight their social functions and downplay care-giver–patient asymmetries. However, situations where patients resist a playful frame actualise a dilemma of social inclusion, on the one hand, and the right to not participate in play, on the other. Showing this, the article contributes to knowledge on how people age with technology; in particular, it draws attention to the limits of an ideal of transparency when social robots are included in dementia care.

Although many positive social changes have been achieved over the past 30 years, members of LGBT, Sistergirl and Brotherboy communities continue to encounter negative experiences with health and ageing service provision. In this article, 232 responses from a survey exploring ageing and care concerns and preferences among LGBT, Sistergirl and Brotherboy communities in Australia were analysed using chi square analysis. The largest proportion of participants were aged 55–64 years (26.4%, n = 61), with the majority residing in metropolitan regions (67.7%, n = 154). The three most frequently selected gender identities were cisgender woman (40.1%, n = 93), cisgender man (39.7%, n = 92) and non-binary (11.6%, n = 28). The three most frequently selected sexual orientations were gay (39.2%, n = 91), lesbian (32.0%, n = 77) and queer (17.7%, n = 41). While many concerns demonstrated no age-related differences, concerns regarding physical differences, respect and inclusion, finances and standard of care reflected higher levels of concern among younger participants compared with older participants. Preferences for receiving information reflected a desire for LGBT, Sistergirl and Brotherboy communities-specific resources for options for support from participants approaching retirement, that is, aged 55–64 (x2 (5, n = 178) = 11.08, p = 0.050); less desire for information provided through public health service services among participants aged 65+ (x2 (5, n = 178) = 15.58, p = 0.008); and variation in preferences regarding supports provided by LGBT, Sistergirl and Brotherboy communities. Results suggest that different generations of LGBT, Sistergirl and Brotherboy members may prefer to receive services and information in different ways. Further research is needed to understand how concerns, expectations and preferences are influenced across generations.

Issues of ‘disability’ and ‘ageing’ are usually approached separately in theorising, activism and policy making. Yet people with disabilities age and many people will experience disability if they live long enough. Human rights approaches to disability enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) are not often applied to older people experiencing disability. This article presents findings of a systematic qualitative analysis of reports made by 28 European states to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the independent body that monitors CRPD implementation, focusing particularly on Article 19 CRPD (‘Living independently and being included in the community’). While states’ reports refer to older people or ageing in different contexts, their approach can be characterised as ambivalent. Reports tend to constitute older people experiencing disability as ‘older’ rather than ‘disabled’; they do not demonstrate a thorough engagement with disability experienced in older age, and display a limited focus on people ageing with lifelong disability. Several reports detail exclusions of ‘older people’ from disability supports to live in the community and some exclude impairments associated with ageing from definitions of what ‘disability’ is. The reports provide almost no evidence of consultation with organisations working on ageing. The article concludes that while the CRPD’s potential to contribute to realising rights for older people with disabilities is under-recognised among scholars and non-governmental organisations, the fact that states refer to older people in their reporting under the CRPD provides a starting point for more engagement.

Our study aims to contribute to the existing body of research on age-related changes in decision-making by investigating susceptibility to the attraction effect across adulthood. Prior studies have produced inconsistent conclusions regarding the decision-making abilities of older individuals, with some portraying them as easily manipulated and risk-averse, while others suggest the opposite. To address this issue, we conducted two experiments using a novel paradigm of the roulette task: (1) in an online environment with 357 participants and (2) in a laboratory setting with 173 participants. The results were consistent and demonstrated the robustness of the attraction effect. However, no age differences in susceptibility to the attraction effect as a common decision bias were found. As predicted, older adults were more likely to commit simple decision-making mistakes, especially in the preliminary trials, which could have serious financial or societal consequences. Additionally, older adults exhibited more risk-seeking behaviours. Furthermore, we observed that the dynamics of decision competence (as indicated by a decrease in the selection of erroneous decoy options and an increase in decision fluency) were similar for both younger and older adults, suggesting preservation of the ability to optimise decision-making while becoming familiar with new tasks. These findings provide insight into the cognitive functioning of older adults and indicate that decision-making abilities in late adulthood may be more complex than commonly assumed.

The literature has shown that, in developing countries, large cash transfers to older people improve the wellbeing of the recipients and their families. While social pensions have recently emerged in East Asia to deliver small cash benefits to older people, there is little consistent evidence of their effects. We examine the effects of the Basic Pension Scheme, a social pension in South Korea, on income and consumption poverty among older adults. We apply a difference-in-differences event study design and other complementary approaches to data covering the full period of program development from 2006 to 2021. The results show that the social pension decreases income poverty but not consumption poverty. While this study analysed the best data currently available, using better-quality data in future research would enable more robust analysis. Further research is also warranted to find how to improve the effectiveness of a non-contributory pension programme as a tool for reducing income and consumption poverty among older adults.