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Faculty of Health & Social Care > Research > Research themes > Ageing and later life

Ageing and later life

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey, The Doctor

Everyone is ageing from the moment they are born, and most of us will be old one day. But individuals experience ageing very differently and the cultural, economic, social and environmental circumstances in which people age are changing rapidly. Researchers in the Faculty of Health & Social Care examine the meanings and experiences of ageing across the life course.

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.
Caryn Leschen
 

Our work is at the forefront of gerontology in the UK and internationally but also contributes to research across the life course in sociology, psychology, history, geography, social policy, social work and nursing. We have particular expertise in participative and biographical forms of research, co-ordinated by the Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies (CABS).

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950

Large-scale projects in the faculty include:

  • OPT-IN – older people’s use of new technologies
  • Transitions in Kitchen Living – the role, function and design of kitchens within the lives of people aged over 60
  • The Oldest Generation
  • The last refuge revisited - in which our award winning researchers Julia Johnson and Sheena Rolph found residential care homes for the elderly that are run by the voluntary sector offer a better overall standard of care than public or privately run homes. They also found that voluntary sector homes had the most stable histories. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the project engaged a team of volunteer researchers - nearly all aged over 60, and some aged 80 or more - to help trace what had happened to 173 homes originally studied by Peter Townsend in his 1962 seminal study The Last Refuge. The resulting book Residential Care Transformed: Revisiting 'The Last Refuge' was awarded the 2011 inaugural Peter Townsend Memorial Prize. 
  • RoAD - Research on Age Discrimination

Grow old with me! The best is yet to come.
Robert Browning

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Victor Hugo

Smaller-scale research projects:

Potential research projects

We’re actively looking for more postgraduate students to join us. For further information on potential research projects, supervisors and applying to study please see our Ageing and later life page within the Open University Research Degrees Prospectus.