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The impact of disparities in socio-economic status on the health of older people is an important issue for policy makers in the context of population ageing. As older people live in different types of economic circumstances and because, as people age, their desires and needs are different to those of younger generations, measures of living standards need to be appropriate for older people. This paper reports on the validation of a measure of living standards for older people based on Sen's Capability Approach. Using this approach, living standards are conceptualised as varying from constraint to freedom rather than from hardship to comfort. Using the New Zealand Longitudinal Study of Ageing omnibus survey of 3,923 adults aged 50–87 years, the validity of the measure was assessed. The results indicate that this measure assesses what older people are able to achieve. In addition, this measure discriminates better at the higher end of the living standards spectrum than an existing measure that assesses living standards from hardship to comfort in terms of what people possess. From this, a short form of the measure has been developed which offers a conceptually based and valid measure useful for survey research with older people. This measure of living standards provides future avenues for improved understandings of socio-economic position in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on the findings of the qualitative phase of a New Zealand longitudinal study on vulnerable young people’s transitions to adulthood. The young people were aged between 12 and 17 years at the time of the first interview. The paper focuses on one key finding, how youth enact agency through their relationships with significant others: families, social workers, teachers and care workers. These youth had experienced sustained exposure to harm including abuse, violence, addictions, disengagement from school and mental health issues. The qualitative interviews focused on young people’s experiences with services (child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health and education support services) their key transitions, and the strategies they used to locate support and resources. The thematic analysis of the interviews indicated that a search for agency was a central motif in young people’s experiences. This was reflected in three thematic clusters: making sense of the world, having a voice and acting on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing discourses condemn funerals as a costly distress purchase where funeral directors have greedily preyed upon funeral arrangers’ grief laden vulnerability. They explain funerals as distress purchases and so debt as the outcome of irrational decisions made while emotionally overwhelmed. These discourses ignore how people might use funeral purchases in dealing with the experience of death as they obscure rather than explain the emotionally infused decision-making that incurs funeral debt. This paper aims to shed light on this aspect of funeral purchases through a New Zealand-based empirical investigation of how intense feelings connect with decision-making associated with funeral cost and debt. The examination highlights that arranging a funeral, rather than being a hurried, ill-informed, choice-limited, emotionally overwhelming distress purchase, is a complex socio-emotional process that crystallises multiple affects into the culturally sanctioned emotion of responsibility, itself mobilised on class lines embedded in existing societal attitudes to debt and socio-economic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]