Bisexual Individuals Envisioning Aging Futures: Emergent Outlooks on Later Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The outlooks individuals envision their future shape their expectations and approach to later life. While bisexual older adults report distinct life experiences from lesbian, gay, and heterosexual counterparts, their outlook on later life remains unclear. Guided by the queer aging futures perspective (Sandberg & Marshall, 2017), this study examines future outlooks among 21 bisexual-identified adults in the U.S. (aged 51–71, Mean=58.6) through semi-structured life review interviews analyzed via inductive thematic coding. Four future outlooks emerged, forming two contrasting but not mutually exclusive pairs: Exploratory vs. Settling-Down and Affirmation vs. Fraught. Individuals with exploratory outlooks anticipated continued fluidity in their own sexuality, gender, and social connections, embracing the potential of rich and flexible social networks and communities in the future. Individuals with settling-down outlooks desire to settle into a comfortable and consistent day-to-day experience with their current families and loved ones. Affirmation-oriented individuals expressed optimism, envisioning futures of acceptance, belonging, and LGBTQ+ activism and aging-supportive communities. Conversely, fraught outlooks entailed concerns about aging, end-of-life challenges, and potential setbacks in LGBTQ+ rights. Consistent with the life course perspective, these outlooks reflect earlier life experiences that may shape individuals’ anticipated futures. We see the exploratory outlook as reflecting particular strengths of bisexual communities, such as a capacity for openness, fluidity, and flexibility that could inspire adaptability in anticipated later lives, not just for bisexual aging but for aging populations broadly. These findings illustrate possible multiplicities and complexities of queering aging futures with distinctly bisexual interpretations of what later life might entail.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".