Building Age-Friendly Community: Notes from the Field

Building age-friendly communities is a global as well as a national concern. The purpose of this paper is to explore fundamental tensions underlying the formulation of age-friendly goals and their implementation, based on a review of age-friendly projects and reflections on the journey towards age friendliness in one state (Rhode Island). The authors conducted a comprehensive investigation of the relevant literature on previous age-friendly initiatives, which included case studies of individual projects, meta-analyses of age-friendly work, and educational toolkits for promoting age-friendly community. They also collected original data from ten focus groups with older adults, interviews with key informant service providers, surveys of older adults and observational environmental audits. Through this multi-faceted approach, they identified recurrent questions often not overtly addressed in building livable communities, despite their being central to decisions made in age-friendly projects. This paper focuses on six questions: Age friendliness for whom? Older adults viewed as a burden or a benefit? Age friendliness by or for older adults? Is age friendliness affordable? Should the target be the aged overall or the needy aged in particular? Should interventions aim to change people or places? The Aging in Community Report, (prepared by the authors and submitted to Rhode Island’s General Assembly), reflected decisions made—albeit sometimes inadvertently—in response to these questions. It showed that priority was given to age friendliness over livability, assistance to vulnerable, older adults was given precedence over helping the entire older population, and top-down interventions were emphasized more than grass-roots endeavors. Its recommendations were geared to leveraging or modestly increasing existing resources to better serve older adults and enhancing opportunities for older adults to contribute to their community. Following the release of the report, the focus shifted from modifications of the environment to facilitating changes in individual behavior to optimize person-environment fit

Illegitimate birth and deprivation: Recent findings from an exploratory study

The association between illegitimate birth and deprivation documented in studies from the 1950s is re-examined using data from an exploratory investigation of three cohorts of illegitimate children born in the 1970s. Because the link between illegitimate birth and disadvantage has been complicated by the complex set of interrelationships betweem illegitimacy, specific demographic characteristics of the illegitimate childbearing population, familial organization preceding and succeeding illegitimate birth, and consequences for the illegitimate child and his mother, recent changes in the incidence, demographic patterning and familial configurations of illegitimacy are outlined before living conditions are described. In addition, control factors have been introduced in the study from which findings are reported to allow separation of the influences of illegitimacy from the impact of correlated demographic and familial variables. An examination of past and current living conditions in terms of housing, income, use of social services and child health reveals a continued association between illegitimate birth and relative deprivation. The persistence of disadvantage is related to the high incidence of single parenthood among illegitimate childbearers and the predominance of illegitimate childbearing among young, single, primiparous, poor women.

Kicking and Screaming

The authors provide an account of their department\u27s minimalist and largely reluctant approach to mandatory assessment in the past decade. A decade earlier, the department had gone all out in an experimental assessment effort supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, an effort the department was neither willing nor able to make once the college\u27s accreditation agency mandated assessment in 2000. The authors describe another less-than-ideal design that has nonetheless involved many of the assessment elements described elsewhere (e.g., alumni and student surveys, classroom assignments, external reviewers, research papers) and has nonetheless yielded usable and utilized feedback for both teaching and curriculum construction

Supporting People as They Age in Community: Information and Service Access

As people age, they often rely on the support of public and private programs to help them live healthy, independent lives. What if older people and their caregivers had access to a single website, phone number, or office that could connect them with all the support and resources they need, from applying for Medicare benefits and finding long-term care facilities to accessing transportation and meal delivery services

Supporting People as They Age in Community: Housing

Aging in community can be a healthier, happier option for many seniors, but only if they have the right resources and support, starting with suitable housing. Homes must be affordable for retirees on fixed incomes and adapted for those with physical limitations. Older people living on their own need access to community services to keep them healthy and connected. Without affordable, age-friendly housing and access to services, aging in community can be stressful, isolating, and limiting, rather than empowering

The Research Critique Approach to Educating Sociology Students

In recent years, instructors of methods courses have made a repeated plea in pedagogical journals for teaching students research techniques through doing or simulating a real project (Ballard 1987; Cutler 1987; Irish 1987; Ransford and Butler 1982; Stoddart 1987; Takata and Leiting 1987; Weiss 1987). Approaches are varied; they include individual, group, or class research projects that generate data for class-specific projects, collect data for external consumption, or use existing data. It is argued that the disembodied knowledge of scientific inquiry presented in the classroom must be supplemented concurrently by an exposure to the actual process of research. Only by making decisions regarding methodology, feasibility, and ethics, as required at various junctures during the research project, can a student appreciate the art, as distinguished from theabstract science, of research