The future of later life: personal and policy perspectives on ageing and meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our forty case studies of persons growing old in the last quarter of the twentieth century indicate something of the variety of different trajectories possible in later life. However, these accounts may be already too distant in life experience and expectations to constitute comparable models for ageing in Britain in the twenty-first century. The physical realities of biological ageing including its variability across individuals may remain similar for the foreseeable future, but the social, psychological and spiritual resources at older persons’ disposal in coping with physical and mental decline are already noticeably changed. It is these resources that largely determine how we experience the later period of ageing, whether as a welcome new stage of life with positive characteristics of its own despite the increasing limitations or as a potentially long trial to be resisted, endured or terminated as soon as possible. Research in social gerontology has expanded considerably in the ten years and more since we completed interviews with the remaining participants of our longitudinal study. Within the United Kingdom, results have been published of two major government-funded research programmes on ageing, the first of which examined factors related to quality of life in later life including issues of identity and meaning (Walker, 2005). However, recent North American studies have paid more explicit attention to the subject of existential meaning (e.g. Krause, 2009; Hill and Turiano, 2014). These have highlighted the significant role played by perception of meaning and purpose in life in a person's continued flourishing and survival throughout adulthood and into old age. They indicate the importance of correctly identifying and sustaining sources of meaning in a person's life. In this final chapter, we present our own thoughts on what we have learned from studying individual older people's lives and in particular how self and meaning are maintained in the process of growing older. We note those aspects of ageing that have made the most impression on us as investigators.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".