Aging Discrimination Legislation - Essay Example

These may be related to older people's use of, and relationships with, particular housing types or social care and health services. They may also be related to features of older people's social, economic and cultural lives. Cross-cutting both of these disciplinary and subject contexts, older peoples' relationships with their environments have been a sustained field of research interest. Most recently, the concern in aging research for the environment, space and place has become even more widespread.

Two reasons may be suggested for this. First, this interest may be part of a wider emphasis on place as a central focus of investigation within a range of social science disciplines. Indeed, as part of cultural turns, many social sciences have recently undergone what may be termed spatial turns and have increasingly embraced the importance of space and place and how they may impact on, and represent human experiences, behaviour and activity. Moreover, the place has increasingly been conceptualized not only in a physical sense but as a complex symbolic and cultural construction.

Second, and more practically, academic interest in space and place has also been motivated by unprecedented demographic, social, fiscal and technological changes that have impacted simultaneously in many countries (McKeever and Coyte, 1999). Indeed, these are well documented, and include rapidly aging populations, changing kinship relationships and responsibilities, an ever broader range of health and social care and increasingly limited resources with which to provide it. Together they have radically altered, and broadened, both the ways and the places in which health and social care is provided.

Importantly, change has meant that the health care system is no longer hospital-based, discrete and bounded, but diffuse. Health care sites now include virtually every setting where human beings reside, frequently and, importantly, live (McKeever and Coyte, 1999). Being substantial recipients of welfare and care services, and a social group particularly vulnerable in economic and social change processes, older people have often experienced these changes most acutely.