Gerontologist

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Ageism is oftentimes sugarcoated within humor. Paper birthday cards are one delivery approach in which ageist messages are perpetuated and reinforced through humor. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: A convenience sample of birthday cards (k = 227), all indicating a decade of age, were acquired from seven national retail stores in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The decades sampled ranged from 21 to 100. With a pre-developed codebook, three raters coded the decade birthday cards on various variables, including age group, ageist tone, and humor...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Around eight million older adults have internally migrated to take care of grandchildren in China. This study aimed to explore how Chinese migrant and non-migrant grandparents perceived successful aging and how they coped with challenges to successful aging. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Based on ecological systems theory, semi-structured interviews were conducted among 21 grandparents (12 migrants, median age = 59 years old) from urban areas in China who provided noncustodial grandchild care...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Little is known about the prevalence of physical pain among family caregivers to older adults. We used national survey data to assess the relative prevalence of caregivers' arthritis and activity-limiting bothersome pain by caregiver and care recipient characteristics to identify which caregivers may be at a higher risk for physical pain. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We analyzed data collected from 1,930 caregivers who participated in the National Study on Caregiving (2017)...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: A growing number of older adults in the United States need subsidized housing, but only 36% of eligible households receive assistance. The purpose of this study is to examine if older renters living in subsidized housing are less likely to experience health decline and mortality over two years compared to low-income older renters who are likely eligible, but do not receive assistance. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Baseline data include 671 subsidized and unsubsidized low-income older renters from the 2015 National Health and Aging Trends Study...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Adopting preventive behaviors is crucial to avoiding COVID-19 infection, and perceived anxiousness may influence such behaviors among older adults and their caregivers. This study investigated the relationships between perceived anxiousness about COVID-19 and preventive behaviors in older adult-caregiver dyads. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted using 1565 older adult-caregiver dyads from the 2020 NHATS/NSOC COVID-19 Supplements data...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Aerobic exercise is a cost-effective intervention to improve arterial stiffness, but its effects on older people are unclear; this review aimed to determine those effects. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Five databases were searched for randomized controlled trials of aerobic exercises. Backward and forward citations and clinical trial registries were also reviewed. Data were extracted and synthesized. A random-effects model was used in a meta-analysis...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The incarcerated population is growing older and by the year 2030, more than one-third of people incarcerated in the United States will be over the age of fifty-five. This population shift will have a profound impact on correctional healthcare systems as older incarcerated people often have multiple chronic illnesses and correctional institutions were not designed with aging and disability in mind. Black women experience greater burdens of comorbid conditions and are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: German legislation establishes advance directives (ADs) as legally binding instruments that all involved parties need to adhere to. This applies also to family members who have been authorized as official surrogates of the AD's author. As surrogates, they are expected to make sure that the AD is being implemented. Our study aims at uncovering how family members experience their legally assigned role as an advocate of an AD. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We conducted 25 episodic interviews with family surrogates of persons living with dementia and used thematic analysis to make sense of our interview data...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Past research about family involvement in long-term care homes mainly focuses on family members' involvement with their own relative, interactions with staff, and collective activities such as Family Councils. Our research provides novel insights into family member's involvement in the care of residents who are not their relatives, an area that has not previously been explored. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: This critical ethnographic study examined ways that family members negotiate and navigate their roles within long-term care homes...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: In 2022, 239 New York state Long-Term Care Facilities (LTCFs) challenged a "Safe Staffing" law in court. Our study compares LTCFs involved and not involved in the lawsuit, testing for differences in staffing measures and resident outcomes during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: New York LTCF level data were obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2019 organization and 2020 COVID-19 datafiles...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Increasing age brings greater risk of death of friends and family (hereafter referred to as loss) potentially impacting individuals' life-space mobility (LSM) trajectory. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Using the UAB Study of Aging, we examined differences in LSM trajectories of 1000 community-dwelling older Alabamians (65+years) with and without loss over 8.5 years. We measured LSM using UAB's Life-Space Assessment (LSA), a validated instrument assessing movement through zones ranging from their bedroom to out of town...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework was used to describe implementation of the Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries (STEADI) Initiative (years 2018-2021) for screening and assessing all older adults > 65 years for falls risk across 34 outpatient rehabilitation clinics within a large health system. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We described the Implementation process and strategies...

This paper argues that the philosophy of ambiguity, associated with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, provides a helpful framework for understanding the complex and paradoxical nature of old age outside the dominant categories of the 'third' and 'fourth' ages. Building on philosophical literature in cultural gerontology including that focused on the 'art of living' and other approaches that draw on existentialist thought, it suggests 'ambiguity' as a theme that has been overlooked in such literature...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) resulted in the need for multiple mitigation strategies. The impacts of these safety measures were felt more extremely by healthcare providers. This qualitative study focused on the experiences of staff in skilled nursing facilities, specifically in locked memory care units, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: This study used a basic interpretive methodology...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: State regulating agencies use 350 different licenses and certifications to govern assisted living (AL), resulting in significant variation in regulations governing health services, the scope of practice, and capacity. This lack of standardization makes it difficult to compare and contrast AL operations and residents' outcomes across similarly regulated communities. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We used qualitative and quantitative methods to empirically develop and describe a typology of state AL regulations that captures inter and intra-state variation...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Adult day services (ADS) provide quality-of-life benefits to people with dementia , but few provide systematic caregiver support. We report outcomes of a multi-site, national trial testing a staff-delivered caregiver program, ADS Plus. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Cluster randomized trial involving 34 ADS: 18 sites provided ADS (controls); 16 provided ADS and ADS Plus (intervention). Trained staff met with caregivers to provide dementia education, support/validation, referrals/linkages, and strategies for care challenges and self-care over 12-months...

This paper demonstrates what emerges when we undertake a literary reading of a medical text, examining its form and structure as a text. The study of what appears to be a singular publication reveals instead an under-examined moment in medical history that anticipates contemporary health investigations in modern medicine, while reflecting the limitations of medical and gerontological knowledge in the 1880s. I demonstrate this argument by conducting a Foucauldian archeology of the text, with attention to authorship and the concept of textual genre...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Age-friendly communities are those with characteristics that can support and promote healthy aging. Among the common domains of these characteristics, transportation and neighborhood spaces are particularly relevant for older adults maintaining mobility in their communities. The objective of this scoping review is to provide a synthesis of age-friendly community indicators, developed for research and planning, that evaluate characteristics most associated with community-level mobility, specifically transportation and neighborhood spaces...