Are young people blindly self-interested? How does university shape students’ political participation? Can busy parents and grandparents find time to volunteer?
Challenging conventional thinking, leading academics explore how individuals’ relationships with civil society change over time as different lifecourse events and stages trigger and hinder civic engagement.
Drawing on personal narratives, longitudinal cohort studies and national surveys, this unprecedented study considers rarely examined aspects of civic engagement including school students’ sense of social responsibility and the charitable legacy bequests of elderly people and highlights significant implications for those promoting greater civic and political participation.
The lifecourse perspective continues to be an important subject in the social sciences. Researching the Lifecourse offers a distinctive approach in that it truly covers the lifecourse (childhood, adulthood and older age), focusing on innovative methods and case study examples from a variety of European and North American contexts. This original approach connects theory and practice from across the social sciences by situating methodology and research design within relevant conceptual frameworks. This diverse collection features methods that are linked to questions of time, space and mobilities while providing practitioners with practical detail in each chapter.
An emerging consensus sees British pension policy as unravelling. Yet the gender impact of expanding private pension provision and relying increasingly on means-testing has been largely overlooked.
This book examines key issues such as: how pension choices over the lifecourse are structured by gender, class and ethnicity; the impact of changing patterns of partnership and parenthood on pension building; the distributional impact of privatising pensions; questions about individualisation of rights, survivor benefits, a citizen’s pension and means-testing; the EU dimension - comparing alternative strategies for improving gender equity.
The book is essential reading for teachers, researchers and students in social gerontology, sociology, social policy and women’s studies; practitioners in social work and welfare rights; policy makers concerned with income in later life; and all those who wish to improve their understanding of pensions issues.
Populations around the globe are ageing rapidly. This demographic shift affects families, market structures and social provisions. This timely volume, part of the Ageing and the Lifecourse series, argues that the lifecourse perspective helps us understand the causes and effects of population ageing. The lifecourse perspective suggests that individuals’ experiences at an early age can influence their decisions and behaviour at a later age. This much-needed volume combines insights from different disciplines and real-life experiences to describe the theories and practices behind this idea. It therefore caters to the needs of scholars, practitioners and policy makers in a range of areas including sociology and political science.
Crossing the traditional divide between social work with children and families and adults, this text applies a lifecourse perspective, within an ecological frame. Based on the principle that practice drives theory, a practical approach for social work is put forward using five interconnected themes:
• duality of support and protection
• life transitions and life events
• intergenerational relations
• civic partnership and engagement
• health and wellbeing
Designed for students and practitioners, this text takes an enquiry-based approach using Critical ART (analysis, reflection and thinking). The book features:
• case studies
• research examples
• tips for Critical ART in practice
• further reading and resources
Transitions and the life course: Challenging the constructions of ‘growing old’ explores and challenges dominant interpretations of transitions as they relate to ageing and the life course. It takes a unique perspective that draws together ideas about late life as expressed in social policy and socio-cultural constructs of age with lived experience. The book is aimed at academics and students interested in social gerontology, policy studies in health and social care, and older people’s accounts of experience.
111 6 Transitions across the lifecourse Introduction Many of the challenges faced throughout a lifecourse happen at points of transition, such as from child to adulthood, into or out of care, adaptation following a loss, a break in attachment relationships, a move from home to elder care and loss of a partner. As Storø (2017) articulates, the concept of transition, as used in professional language, has become central in fields of research, such as studies of young people leaving care, but remains undeveloped theoretically. Storø (2017) provides an in
27 ONE Lifecourses, insight and meaning This book explores an approach to ageing in terms of a central concern to human beings as they live through their lifetimes: how they create meaning and insight in their lives, and what meaning both they, and ageing itself, have to others. The importance of meaning in ageing has long been a concern in the study of older people and intergenerational relations. Even if this concern is often expressed obliquely, it is stressed explicitly in such works as I Don’t Feel Old, by Thompson et al (1990); Chris Phillipson (1998
Section V Further lifecourse influences on health A family of nine living in a single attic room in Dundee, 1938.
29 THREE A lifecourse scholar’s view: lifecourses crystallise in demographic structures Andreas Motel-Klingebiel Introduction: changing population structures and the lifecourse The ageing of societies is one of the social megatrends in the Western world, China, India and other major societies (United Nations, 2001). Population ageing is the change of the demographic structure towards an increase in absolute numbers and relative share of older people. It is mainly due to prolonged lifespans, with mortality increasingly moved into the later life phases, as
