Ageing and the Lifecourse

The ageing of the population has enormous implications for the provision of, and access to, health care. Christina Victor's important textbook provides comprehensive overview of the experiences of older people, chapters on physical health, mental health, disability and lifestyle, a thesis of current policy developments, the key debates on the future health of elders and an international, up-to-date perspective. Written by a leader in the field, the book covers key questions such as the fitness of future older people, the widening inequalities in their health and whether health in old age is related to habits and behaviour in earlier life.

This book focuses on older people as makers of meaning and insight, highlighting the evolving values, priorities and ways of communicating that make later life fascinating. It explores what creating 'meaning' in later life really implies, for older people themselves, for how to conceptualize older people and for relationships between generations. The book offers a language for discussing major types of life-course meaning, not least those concerning ethical and temporal aspects of the ways people interpret their life-courses, the ways older people form part of social and symbolic landscapes, and the types of wisdom they can offer. It will appeal to students of gerontology, sociological methodology, humanistic sociology, philosophy, psychology, and health promotion and medicine.