Outi Jolanki

Background and Objectives: Taiwan and Finland represent contrasting welfare and cultural contexts—familialist–market and universalist models—yet both face demographic shifts, changing family formations, and evolving housing needs in later life. This study explores how older adults in these contexts navigate decisions to age in place or relocate, using Clapham’s (2005) housing pathways framework to analyze the roles of personal control, identity, social support, and inequality. Research Design and Methods: This qualitative study draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 42 participants in Taiwan (aged 65–93) and 40 in Finland (aged 57–92). Data were analyzed abductively through thematic analysis. Results: In Taiwan, personal control was relational, rooted in intergenerational reciprocity, ancestral property ties, and gendered caregiving norms; in Finland, it was individual, supported by anticipatory planning and accessible housing. Taiwanese identity was place-based, while Finnish identity was community-built, often after relocation. Social support in Taiwan centered on kin and neighborhood networks, with migrant care workers supplementing gaps; in Finland, communal housing fostered peer reciprocity alongside formal services and adult children. Inequalities were shaped by financial constraints and limited public provision in Taiwan, and by residual access gaps in Finland. Discussion and Implications: Housing decisions were not purely individual choices but negotiated within structural, cultural, and relational contexts. Policies should move beyond promoting aging in place as default, instead enabling it as an empowered choice. Expanding affordable, accessible housing and community services in Taiwan and sustaining inclusive, service-integrated housing in Finland are key to supporting diverse later-life housing pathways.

In recent years, many Finnish cities and municipalities have aspired to develop services that support older adults’ well‐being and social inclusion. This study focuses on the Social Hub model, a local social innovation developed in the city of Tampere. Social hubs operate on a neighbourhood level, providing free‐of‐charge service coordination and counselling, group activities, and meeting places for social gatherings. This study aims to look at whether this kind of local innovation can support older adults’ well‐being and social inclusion. The sociomaterial perspective and multidimensional model of well‐being (the having–doing–loving–being approach) provided theoretical and analytical guidelines to examine older adults’ experiences and perceptions of social hubs. The qualitative interview data was collected among people living in service housing, senior housing, or ordinary housing in the proximity of the social hubs studied. Face‐to‐face and “go‐along” interviews with 19 older adults aged between 57 and 96 were analysed with theory‐driven content analysis. The results showed that the hubs are a valuable local resource for older adults, providing free services, accessible and appealing shared spaces, and activities that promote social well‐being, physical activity, creativity, and autonomy. The hubs serve as important gathering points for older adults in the neighbourhood, fostering community‐building among citizens residing in different types of housing. The results highlight the importance of acknowledging well‐being as a multidimensional phenomenon. The Social Hub model provides one practical tool to support older adults’ well‐being and social inclusion by offering various kinds of resources and social and cultural activities.

Objective: The study analysed how its participants positioned themselves and other people as actors in daily life, and what matters they portrayed as meaningful in seeking and receiving support in daily life.Background: Family care has traditionally played an important role in elder care in Finland. Current policy goals will further increase the importance of family care, yet research on how people with memory illnesses and their spouses perceive care arrangements is scarce. Method: The study drew from theory of relational agency and positioning theory. The data came from semi-structured, in-depth interviews (10) of home-dwelling people diagnosed with a memory illness and their spouses. The interviewees’ age varied from 62 to 88. The analysis focused on the participants’ self-descriptions and descriptions of their experiences and actions in relation to informal and formal care arrangements. Results: The participants with a memory illness positioned themselves together with their spouses as a couple, as satisfied service recipients, as active and knowledgeable service users, or even as consumers who critically evaluated social and health care services. People with memory illnesses are capable of expressing their self-reflexive agentic self and adopting different positions to that of a person with dementia. Conclusion: There is need to better acknowledge agency of people with memory illnesses and to develop different data collection and analysis methods that enable them to convey their views.

As the population ages, the number of people with dementia increases. An emerging body of research is focusing on living with dementia and understanding the experience of caring and the care burden. There is much less research on the meaning of dementia from the perspective of an older couple’s spousal relationship and related intimacy. This qualitative study explores the meanings of emotional and physical intimacy and the changes brought by dementia in the couplehood of persons with dementia and their spousal carers. The data comprise semi-structured interviews with 35 persons. The interviews were analysed using inductive qualitative content analysis. Four themes describing the meanings of relational intimacy were identified: intimacy as a striving force, intimacy turning into worrisome behaviour, intimacy as physical and emotional dependency, and intimacy turning into one-sided caring for a partner. Dementia changes the intimate relationship in many ways, but shared affection and long-term partnership help maintain the spousal relationship. While dementia may bring about conflicts and behavioural challenges in an intimate relationship, the couple’s shared intimacy and a sense of responsibility for one another may serve as a resource and support the continuity of couplehood.

As an inevitable process, the number of older adults is increasing in many countries worldwide. Two of the main problems that society is being confronted with more and more, in this respect, are the inter-related aspects of feelings of loneliness and social isolation among older adults. In particular, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its associated restrictions have exacerbated the loneliness and social-isolation problems. This paper is first and foremost a comprehensive survey of loneliness monitoring and management solutions, from the multidisciplinary perspective of technology, gerontology, socio-psychology, and urban built environment. In addition, our paper also investigates machine learning-based technological solutions with wearable-sensor data, suitable to measure, monitor, manage, and/or diminish the levels of loneliness and social isolation, when one also considers the constraints and characteristics coming from social science, gerontology, and architecture/urban built environments points of view. Compared to the existing state of the art, our work is unique from the cross-disciplinary point of view, because our authors’ team combines the expertise from four distinct domains, i.e., gerontology, social psychology, architecture, and wireless technology in addressing the two inter-related problems of loneliness and social isolation in older adults. This work combines a cross-disciplinary survey of the literature in the four aforementioned domains with a proposed wearable-based technological solution, introduced first as a generic framework and, then, exemplified through a simple proof of concept with dummy data. As the main findings, we provide a comprehensive view on challenges and solutions in utilizing various technologies, particularly those carried by users, also known as wearables, to measure, manage, and/or diminish the social isolation and the perceived loneliness among older adults. In addition, we also summarize the identified solutions which can be used for measuring and monitoring various loneliness- and social isolation-related metrics, and we present and validate, through a simple proof-of-concept mechanism, an approach based on machine learning for predicting and estimating loneliness levels. Open research issues in this field are also discussed.