Journal of Aging & Social Policy

There is growing recognition that older persons, both male and female, may experience sexual assault. One clearly identified gap in the body of scientific literature is examination of the criminal justice response for older adults who have been sexually assaulted. This retrospective age-group comparative data analysis examines publicly available population and police statistics for 2018 to describe rates (per 100,000) of reported sexual assault across adult age categories (young adult, n  = 748; adult, n  = 1,478; middle age, n  = 290; older adult, n  = 58) and compare (using Chi-square bivariate analysis) the criminal justice response to sexual assault for these adult age categories in New Zealand (NZ)...

The Korean government implemented the pilot project for community care for older adults in June 2019. This study investigated the outcomes of the pilot project among Korean older adults by linking survey data from the pilot project with data of Korean National Health Insurance Service. The final sample included 17,801 pilot project participants and 68,145 in a matched comparison group. Pilot program participants experienced an increase of 4.8 days for length of home stay and a reduction of $956 (US) per participant relative to the matched comparison group...

Population aging will increase the demand for long-term care services. Many countries, including Chile, have not implemented comprehensive responses to address these demands, relying on informal care. This article aims to estimate the economic value of caregiving in Chile, contributing to filling a gap in the literature and the policy debate. Economic value is estimated using replacement and opportunity cost approaches using two nationally representative databases: one survey on time use (to estimate hours of caregiving) and one on socioeconomic characterization (to identify caregivers and wages)...

Technology is increasingly being integrated into Age-Friendly Environments (AFEs). This study explores how technology is manifested in AFE policies in China. We conducted a content analysis of 176 policies spanning seven years to identify the relationship between technology and AFEs and the characteristics of policy development. The findings indicate that technology plays a role in advancing a smart age-friendly society, particularly in terms of enhancing community support and health services and promoting social inclusion...

Policies aimed at increasing employment among older people often focus on the statutory retirement age. Taking into account the characteristics of workers and work-related factors, we examine the impact of reaching the statutory retirement age on continuing employment. In addition to the use of survival trees, we propose a novel method to predict the probability of staying in employment based on an ensemble of survival trees. We focus on Poland as an example of a European country with a particularly low share of older workers in the labor force...

Since the 1960s, the goal of active longevity has been mentioned repeatedly in Russian policy documents on aging and aging-related research. Analyzing current policy documents revealed divergences in the ways the term was interpreted, which in turn allowed for aging policy to develop in more than one direction. One policy development path considers active longevity to be more or less synonymous with the active aging concept. It focuses on older people's potential, and measures policy progress according to the Active Longevity Index (ALI)...

Home- and community-based services (HCBS) may contribute to lowering mortality and enhancing quality of life among older adults. Limited research, however, has examined this relationship in the Chinese context. This study explored the longitudinal association between perceived availability of HCBS and all-cause mortality among Chinese older adults. This cohort study included 8,102 individuals aged 65 years and older from the 2011, 2014, and 2018 waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey...

Understanding individuals' long-term care preferences is essential to the provision of person-centered care. This study aims to describe the preferences for long-term care settings and investigates sociocultural factors associated with long-term care preferences among older Chinese adults. Responses from 22,112 older adults aged 60 years or above were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. Four ideal long-term care settings were identified: in-home care, community day care, institutional care, and undecided long-term care arrangements...

Previous studies have not amply explored the next move of older adults currently spending their retirement abroad. This paper examined the future migration decisions of East Asian retirees in the last stage of life marked by frailty, dependency, and abjection (i.e. the fourth age). A survey of Chinese and Japanese retirees in Thailand ( n  = 204) was conducted during 2019-2021. Binary logistic regression analysis indicated that age, income, religion, residence, Thai spouse/partner, and property at origin were significantly associated with future migration decisions ( p  < ...

With population aging, governments have become increasingly involved in the administration, funding, and regulation of formal long-term care (LTC) systems. We examine the association between institutional trust and formal LTC service utilization among older adults aged ≥60 years with care needs in South Korea's public LTC scheme. Using data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging and hierarchical logistic regressions, we evaluate the respective roles of trust in government and trust in the LTC program on service utilization...

Hip fractures, strokes, and heart attacks are common acute health events that can lead to long-term disability, care utilization, and unmet needs. However, such impacts, especially in the long term, are not fully understood. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, 1992-2018, this study examines the long-term trajectories of individuals suffering such health shocks, comparing with individuals not experiencing health shocks. Hip fracture, stroke, and heart attack are confirmed to have severe implications for disability...

Nursing homes receive complaints when actual care provided to residents misaligns with desired care, suggesting that person-centered care (PCC) and honoring resident preferences in care delivery may help prevent complaints from arising. We explore whether nursing home implementation of a PCC tool, the Preferences for Everyday Living Inventory (PELI), is related to measures of complaints. Publicly available data on Ohio nursing homes was used to examine 1,339 nursing home-year observations. Regression techniques were used to evaluate the relationship between the extent of PELI implementation and four complaint outcomes: any complaint, number of complaints, any substantiated complaint, and number of substantiated complaints...

Despite major restrictions on economic activity due to the first lockdown starting in March 2020, public financial support helped to limit the financial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. However, certain groups were more affected than others. Most significantly, people in the lowest income quintile were more affected than those who had higher levels of income prior to the pandemic. Although this aspect has also been analyzed in other studies, less is known about how income shocks affected living standards...

Evidence suggests that enrollment in a health insurance scheme is associated with higher levels of formal healthcare utilization among older adults, especially those with low income in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), including Ghana. This study examines the prevalence of formal healthcare utilization and associated factors among older adults with low income and health insurance subscription enrolled in a social intervention program (known as the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty [LEAP] program) in Ghana. Cross-sectional data were obtained from an Aging, Health, Lifestyle and Health Services Survey conducted in 2018 among 200 older adults aged 65 years and above enrolled in the LEAP program...

As population aging continues to become a major demographic trend globally, it is essential to examine the demographic shifts at the micro-level to understand the changing scenario of older populations. A lack of adequate data in India on older populations is a hindrance to the government's efforts to provide social security for them. This study uses gridded population data to analyze the spatial patterns, micro-level trends, and the share of older populations in India for 2030 and 2040. The study's findings demonstrate that India has seen a dramatic shift in population aging trends, with large intra-state variability...

Comparative adult guardianship law and other alternatives, especially in an Asian context, is an under-investigated area. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the literature by comparing the adult guardianship law and other alternatives from the perspectives of Singapore and Japan. The central argument of this paper is that in order for the law of adult guardianship to be widely adopted in Asian societies like Singapore and Japan - where much of adult guardianship related issues are governed by informal familial arrangements; this would require governments to do more than the mere enacting of adult guardianship legislation...

This study aimed to investigate whether social participation (SP) can decrease depressive symptom severity in disabled older adults. A total of 5,937 disabled participants (4877, 1970, 219, and 8 participants responding 1, 2, 3, 4 times, respectively), obtained from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, were enrolled in our analysis. Based on pooled Ordinary Least Square regressions, SP was associated with decreased depressive symptom severity, and this association was significant in recreational activities and interacting with friends...

Social policies determine the distribution of factors (e.g. education, cardiovascular health) protecting against the development of dementia in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the association between social policies and the likelihood of AD without dementia (ADw/oD) has yet to be evaluated. We estimated this association in an ecological study using systematic review and meta-analysis. Four reference databases were consulted; 18 studies were included in the final analysis. ADw/oD was defined as death without dementia in people with clinically significant AD brain pathology...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to issue public measures to address threats to the safety of citizens and the healthcare system. The role of chronological age in the ways in which different countries coped with the pandemic is particularly intriguing. Based on pool of purposely selected twenty-one countries, this article compares a variety of urgent public health policies that have been enforced during the first wave of the pandemic. It analyzes the ways in which countries introduced instructions related to older people and/or chronological age in relation to: Lockdown, exit and triage policies...

As older individuals play instrumental roles in supporting their families and contributing to their workplaces, it is essential to understand how society perceives them in relation to these social roles. This study compares age-based (e.g. senior citizen), familial role-based (e.g. grandmother) and occupational role-based framing (e.g. old(er) doctor) of older adults over 210 years in the United States, and explores the sentiments and narratives associated with each type of framing. We created the largest historical corpus of American English - a 600-million-word-dataset comprising over 150,000 texts and spanning 210 years (1810-2019)...