Aging in Place in Late Life: Theory, Methodology, and Intervention

Copyright © 2012 Agneta Malmgren Fänge et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This special issue focuses on aging in place in late life. Aging in place is about being able to continue living in one's own home or neighborhood and to adapt to changing needs and conditions. It is of high concern due to the increasing number of old and very old people in all societies and challenges researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in many societal and scientific areas and disciplines. We invited authors to contribute original research papers as well as conceptually driven review papers that would stimulate the continuing efforts to understand the different aspects of aging in place in late life. The papers that were submitted came from very diverse disciplines, such as sociology, psychology , occupational therapy, nursing, architecture, public planning, and social work. Given the number and diversity of papers submitted, we can conclude that aging in place is an important concern throughout the world and that different kinds of measures are taken to come up with local, national, and international solutions that enhance aging in place. It remains a very complex issue that needs and deserves to be investigated from many different perspectives and assessed by means of different methodological origin, covering qualitative and quantitative measures, as well as mixed-method approaches. Subsequently, the selection of papers presented in this issue only sheds light on some aspects of sociophysical person-environment exchange as people age, contributing to the ongoing discussion in the field of environmental gerontology. Vasunilashorn et al. present a review study targeting the concept of aging in place as a research topic whose time has come. They found an increasing proportion of scientific papers over time, in particular those focusing on policy matters and the use of technology to support ageing in place. They concluded that aging in place is far from a one-size-fits-all issue but rather something that differs across populations due to, for example, culture, demographic, and legal systems. The perspectives of the older persons themselves on social relationships and connectedness, social exclusion and inclusion, and the impact of the neighborhood were targeted in the following studies. By way of qualitative interviews, in the study by Emlet et al., older people were asked about their perception …