Ageing in a material world

Abstract

The experience of ageing is shaped by social location. For those who experience economic hardship, the effects of a lifetime of disadvantage tend to accumulate in later life. The recent attention to positive and successful ageing has particular implications for disadvantaged and disabled older people. This project focuses on the qualitative experience of ageing in the context of the material constraints in people's lives. Forty eight people aged 55 to 70 years were interviewed. Critical realist discourse analysis of extracts is used here to show how the rhetorical and discursive accounts of ageing are grounded in the material circumstances of participants' lives and also shaped by societal demands to age well and positively. Access to material resources constrains older people from ageing in ways that they value, and the discursive construction of citizenship and morality has implications for who they can be.