Arising from personal experience and observations in employment, this thesis considers the working life course experiences of people growing older with long-term physical or sensory disabilities. It uses: work as a fulcrum to examine experience; the concept of the life course to embed disability within the ordinary elements of everyday life; and a social model approach to conceptualise impairment and disability. In addition, Adaptive Theory is used as an approach to the overall study design to recognise both researcher perspective and substantive theory in developing research instruments, data collection techniques and analytical framework. The thesis begins with a research and literature review which identifies some parallels and tensions between the disciplines of Critical Social Gerontology and Disability Studies. Building on exploratory discussions with disabled trade unionists, it then focuses on empirical research with 14 workers aged 40-65, from a range of non-sheltered occupations and disabled by physical or sensory impairments for at least 15 years. In-depth interviews about the intersection of work, ageing and disability examine how each person manages the challenges and opportunities encountered. The findings indicate how the impact of being disabled across the lifecourse is not only structurally influenced and socially constructed but also dynamically contextualised and interwoven into individual self-concept. In moving away from a conventional focus on barriers, discrimination and oppression the thesis demonstrates that a more nuanced approach to lifecourse experiences is fundamental to understanding the process of growing older with a disability. In addition, by defining and accessing participants as ‘workers’ rather than ‘older’ or ‘disabled’ people they proved to be both ‘hidden’ and ‘seldom heard’ in the existing research and literature. In parallel, therefore, the thesis also explores the research process itself by posing questions about the nature of research both in Critical Social Gerontology and in Disability Studies.

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Children placed in foster care are the most at-risk youth group in the U.S., often experiencing negative events and outcomes before, during, and after foster care. Despite the availability of statistical data centered on (former) foster children, little is known about how these individuals make sense of their often negative and rupture-laden experiences. One way that individuals make sense of rupture in life is through narratives. Narratives are important to examine because they allow for better understanding of the experience(s) and what experiences mean to those who have lived through them. Specifically, narratives might also illuminate differences in (former) foster children's emergence from foster care as resilient, or with wellbeing intact. Thus, this study aimed to explore adult, former foster children's narrative sensemaking and whether types of stories told correlate with narrator participants' (self-reported) resilience scores. Using mixed methods, I employed narrative thematic analysis to qualitatively analyze narrative interviews, looking at how participants made sense of rupture experiences. Independent coders conducted a content analysis, coding each story as one of the four emergent types, to allow for quantitative comparisons. A Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that resilience scores differed significantly among story types. Follow-up tests determined that narrators of Thriving after Rupture, in which narrators achieved personally because of foster care-related experiences, and Transformation for Self and Others, in which narrators both achieved personally and assisted others because of past rupture experiences, displayed significantly higher resilience than did narrators of Ongoing Rupture, which framed narrators as stuck in rupture and sensemaking cycles. Narrators of Helping Others and Giving Back, who talked about assisting others in the foster care system because of their own experiences, also trended toward displaying greater resilience than Ongoing Rupture. These results indicate that framing might be as important to wellbeing as lived experiences. Thus, it is important to continue to explore narrative therapy as a means to bolster (former) foster children's resilience.

The background to this study is that there is no studies on youth and their transition to adulthood in preindustrial Sweden. The main objective of this thesis has therefore been to analyze young peoples transition to adulthood during the late 18th and 19th centuries in a region of the northern part of Sweden. The social context of the region was mainly agrarian during the investigated period despite the fact that in the later part of the 19th and beginning of 20th century, a development of a growing forest industry had started. The main questions is: How and when in life did different social categories of young people establish an independent and adult life? Where there any changes in transitional patterns and was the establishment smoother or more troublesome at different times during the investigated period ? Where there any changes regarding social norms related to the establishment of adult life? The transition to adult life is studied from a life-course approach and four key-transitions; The First Holy communion, leaving home, marriage and parenthood are regarded as significant steps within the process to a independent social position. Individual data related to keytransitions is mainly collected from cathectical examination records and comprised 2206 individuals born in six different cohorts between 1770 and 1900. The selected cohorts represents individuals that had to deal with different social conditions during their youth and transition to adult life. The main results regarding the transition to adult life can be summarized in two words, complexity and variance. Usually it was a "long" transition but the number of accomplished keytransitions and the order between them varied, as well as ages when taking the first Holy Communion, leaving home, marriage and entering parenthood varied. Transitional patterns varied between different categories of youth. A dividing line existed between the sexes, those from households strongly rooted in the agricultural structure and those with background in social categories that didn't own or was in possession of land. Social norms related to keytransitons changed along this dividing line during the investigated period of time, and became less permissive within landowning or land-possessing categories and less prescriptive in other categories. Transitional patterns were also influenced by the social situation at different historical times. The need for labor, war and years of famine directly intervened in timing and sequencing of keytransitions. A long term development was that the transition to adult life became more problematic in the later part of the 19th century, especially among young people who were less integrated in the social context and among socially stigmatized youth. Finally, young people were active and reflexive in seeking social space to make the transition to adult life, actions that sometimes caused tensions and conflicts between generations. / digitalisering@umu

abstract: Identifying modifiable causes of chronic disease is essential to prepare for the needs of an aging population. Cognitive decline is a precursor to the development of Alzheimer's and other dementing diseases, representing some of the most prevalent and least understood sources of morbidity and mortality associated with aging. To contribute to the literature on cognitive aging, this work focuses on the role of vascular and physical health in the development of cognitive trajectories while accounting for the socioeconomic context where health disparities are developed. The Assets and Health Dynamics among the Oldest-Old study provided a nationally-representative sample of non-institutionalized adults age 65 and over in 1998, with biennial follow-up continuing until 2008. Latent growth models with adjustment for non-random missing data were used to assess vascular, physical, and social predictors of cognitive change. A core aim of this project was examining socioeconomic and racial/ethnic variation in vascular predictors of cognitive trajectories. Results indicated that diabetes and heart problems were directly related to an increased rate of memory decline in whites, where these risk factors were only associated with baseline word-recall for blacks when conditioned on gender and household assets. These results support the vascular hypotheses of cognitive aging and attest to the significance of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic variation in vascular influences on cognitive health. The second substantive portion of this dissertation used parallel process latent growth models to examine the co-development of cognitive and functional health. Initial word-recall scores were consistently associated with later functional limitations, but baseline functional limitations were not consistently associated with later word-recall scores. Gender and household income moderated this relationship, and indicators of lifecourse SES were better equipped to explain variation in initial cognitive and functional status than change in these measures over time. Overall, this work suggests that research examining associations between cognitive decline, chronic disease, and disability must account for the social context where individuals and their health develop. Also, these findings advocate that reducing socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in cognitive health among the aging requires interventions early in the lifecourse, as disparities in cognitive trajectories were solidified prior to late old age. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Sociology 2011

Although the association between social inequality and poor adult health is well established, the mechanisms by which inequality is translated into poor adult health are less clear. Increasingly, evidence suggests that many adult health problems and health disparities have their origins in early life; the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) hypothesis provides an explanatory mechanism linking adverse early life conditions with permanent structural or functional changes that increase the risk for disease. This hypothesis is consistent with bioarchaeological research noting reduced lifespan among individuals exhibiting signs of childhood stress. The principal aim of this dissertation is to contribute a bioarchaeological perspective to health disparities research by investigating how health disparities can be measured and understood in the past. This study focuses on early life conditions as a source of adult health disparity by examining a skeletal sample for the association between childhood stress and adult longevity; the relationship between childhood stress and the presence of adult health conditions; and sex, ancestry, and regional differences in these relationships. The study sampled 830 age-documented, U.S. born African American males and females and Euro-American males from the Terry and the Hamann-Todd anatomical collections, representing socially-marginalized individuals from the late 19th- to early 20th centuries. Enamel hypoplasia, femoral length, and vertebral neural canal diameters represented childhood stress; skeletal fractures, tibial periostosis, and the diseased, missing, and filled tooth index represented adult health. Longevity was modeled with Kaplan-Meier survival curves and adult health relationships were modeled with logistic regression. Additionally, cause of death data from historic health department publications and the study sample morgue records were examined for disparity in the epidemiological transition from infectious to degenerative cause of death. The study found mixed results for all analyses. There was no reduction in longevity for the presence of enamel hypoplasia, short femoral length, or reduced thoracic neural canal diameter. African American males had statistically significant reduced longevity for small lumbar vertebral neural canal diameters. African American males from the Hamann-Todd Collection and Euro-American males from both collections had significant relationships between vertebral neural canal diameters and adult conditions; these relationships varied among the groups but in most cases demonstrated reduced odds for having the adult condition for individuals with smaller canal diameters. African American females had no differential survival or relationships between variables over the lifecourse. All groups except for the Terry Collection Euro-American males continued to have more infectious disease deaths than degenerative disease deaths. The study results contribute to disparities research by demonstrating that the consequences of childhood stress varied by sex and ancestry and by demonstrating within-population variation in timing of the epidemiological transition. Additionally, the study results support the contention of greater male sensitivity to environmental conditions and contributes evidence supporting the DOHaD hypothesis.

The choice of studying motherhood was born out of our own self- perceived experiences as mothers, and in the sense of having a “book of rules” constantly present in the motherly role. Throughout times the motherly discourses surrounding motherhood have included aspects such as caring for and nurturing children, to take care of the household chores and to overall have an all seeing eye over the logistics of the home. In contrast, the men´s primary task is to provide the family with economic capital. ”The good mother”- this pure madonna figure, is often linked to a naturalness discourse which points towards women as created to bear children, giving birth and then finding themselves instinctively knowing how to take care of the newborn. This idea of motherhood as the women´s primary task is traditional in the sense of being rooted in historical contexts. Through a qualitative study, we wish to contribute to a wider understanding of the complex ways in which discourses work and affect the individual lives of women adulging in motherhood, focusing on their own experiences of motherhood. We have chosen to interview nine women from three different families, in each family three generations. Previous research points at two big discourses in western society- the naturalness discourse and the discourse surrounding gender equality. With a focus on these two discourses the study also is carried out with a lifecourse perspective as a way of capture the very important aspect of time. Time is a central part in our attempt to understand the ways in which discourses work, travels and modifies over time. Our findings, watching three generations of mothers reinforces the picture of the work towards equality is both complex and far from done. The motherly discourses are, even today, often characterized by a traditional thinking motivated by and linked to a perception of the natural when it comes to the different roles men and women are attributed. This, in turn, causes a collision with a “modern” discourse surrounding equality. Nowadays the roles embedded in the gender contract is overall more equal than before. Thus you could expect women to, in greater occurence, be freed of the discursive fetters. Despite this, this study points at the opposite direction, leaving us with a feeling of failure when it comes to gender equality. A traditional discourse of “the good mother” is still present in a modified “modern” version. Women in western society therefor are free when it comes to a lot of aspects, but not fully free in the sense of being themselves in the motherly role.

À partir d’une enquête de terrain mêlant entretiens, observations, questionnaires et analyses de bases de données de brevets, cette thèse rend compte du parcours d’inventrices/inventeurs autonomes en France et au Québec. Ces projets d’invention s’inscrivent dans un moment de passage, de chevauchement, d’encastrement, de flou entre les étapes de la vie ou les domaines d’activités des individus. La première partie de la thèse s’attache à mettre en perspective la notion d’inventeur et le terrain de l’invention. Le processus d’invention fait ensuite l’objet d’une analyse en trois phases : engagement, formalisation et cheminement. Des aller-retour se produisent entre les différentes phases du processus, puisqu’une invention ne cesse de se jouer et de se rejouer au fil du temps. Ce travail est l'occasion d'insister sur les interactions entre les différentes sphères de l'existence et de montrer l'apport d'une analyse qui appréhende la sphère professionnelle en articulation avec la famille, les amis·es et les loisirs. Une troisième partie de la thèse mobilise l’analyse de réseaux à l’aide d’une méthodologie innovante, afin d’appréhender la dynamique d’accès aux ressources tout au long du processus d’invention. Cette thèse a pour ambition de comprendre la fabrique d’une invention dans un monde en recomposition, au carrefour de grandes transformations des sociétés modernes occidentales telles l’expansion des singularités, la démocratisation de l’innovation et la montée des incertitudes. / This PhD is based on a wide range of fieldwork, including in-depth interviews, observations, questionnaires and patent database analysis. It focuses on the experiences of autonomous inventors in France and in Quebec. Their inventive projects are characterized by notions of passage, overlap, embeddedness, and by a blur between life stages or areas of activity. The first part of the thesis defines the notion of « invention » and circumscribes the field of study. The invention process is then analyzed according to three phases that mark individual experiences: engagement, formalization and duration. The process forms a circle of inventive activities, with frequent loops back and forth between phases, as the inventive process continues to play and to replay itself out over time. This study offers an opportunity to emphasize the interactions between different spheres of life and to stress the importance of taking into account the interweaving of the professional sphere with the family, friendship and leisure. The third part mobilizes an innovative network analysis methodology, in order to capture the access to material and immaterial resources throughout the whole inventive process. This thesis aims to better understand the inventive process at the crossroads of major shifts in contemporary Western societies, such as the rise of singularities, the democratization of innovation and increased uncertainty.

Cities work to create attractive environments to increase population growth. Attracting people to a place is only the beginning, however, the hard part is getting the people to see the city as an attractive place, to live throughout their lives. This study has investigated how the concept of attractiveness is applied to different age groups in urban planning, and how young adults, families with children and pensioners, interpret the concept of attractiveness. The focus of this study is on the city of Härnösand. To investigate this, interviews were conducted with a planning coordinator and a business developer at Härnösand municipality, as well as with two people from each age group from Härnösand's population. A total of eight interviews have been conducted. The results showed that there are differences and similarities between how people in different life stages interpret what is attractive in a city. The pensioners considered culture to be one of the most attractive things in Härnösand, while the other respondents did not place much value on it. All age groups found it attractive that Härnösand is a small town, which means that it is close to everything. All respondents also agreed that the sea and nature in Härnösand create attractiveness, and that areas with very hard surfaces, such as industrial areas, are not seen as attractive. The young adults found indoor activities attractive, while families with children placed more importance on outdoor activities. The retirees did not emphasize the range of activities as an attractive attribute. Safety was something that all age groups believed created attractiveness in a place, but the pensioners were the group that valued safety the most and the young adults valued safety the least. The result showed that the municipality of Härnösand thinks it is important to get the opinions of the citizens in order to create environments that suit everyone, which in the long run can have a positive effect on population development. The study indicates that Härnösand municipality has ambitions to create attractive environments for different age groups. It shows an example of work with a planning program for an area called Skeppsbron in Härnösand where the municipality used the 8 80 method in the citizen dialogue to try to create an equally attractive place for all ages. The method assumes that if a city is as attractive to an 8-year-old as to an 80-year-old, then it is equally attractive to everyone in a city. However, it emerged that there may be challenges in gathering opinions from a wide range of citizens. The results of this survey showed that all respondents actively chose not to participate in citizen dialogues due to lack of time and lack of interest, which creates difficulties for the municipality of Härnösand to create attractiveness for everyone. This study therefore concludes that Härnösand may have to change its citizen dialogues in some way in order to gather more people's opinions. By doing this, the quality of community planning can be improved and Härnösand can be developed into an even more attractive place for more people in different life stages, which in turn could perhaps have a positive effect on population development.

Dans la communauté de langue française à Halifax, on dit que les jeunes qui y sont scolarisés en français « disparaissent dans le brouillard » après la fin de leurs études secondaires. L'expression qui sous-entend qu'au départ du milieu scolaire, au moment de la transition vers l'âge adulte, ces jeunes vont mener une vie complètement en anglais, langue majoritairement parlée en Nouvelle-Écosse. Pour tenter de mieux comprendre ce « brouillard » et les jeunes adultes qui y « disparaissent », j'ai mené un projet d'étude en sociolinguistique, avec une approche critique. Selon les études menées il y a trente ans sur les transitions de phase de vie et les représentations linguistiques, les représentations linguistiques à l'adolescence seraient en flux constant, pour ensuite se stabiliser à l'âge adulte. Cependant, cette conception du parcours de la vie qui suppose un passage direct de l'adolescence à la vie adulte n'est plus d'actualité dans le contexte nord-américain. Là, les recherches soulignent que le passage vers une vie adulte normative est non seulement prolongé, mais que les marqueurs typiques de la vie adulte sont remis en question, principalement due aux contraintes socio-économiques structurelles vécues par les jeunes adultes d'aujourd'hui. On dénomme ce prolongement comme « Emerging Adulthood ». D'ici, je pose la question: qu'arrive-t-il aux représentations linguistiques lors de l'Emerging Adulthood, surtout dans le contexte des jeunes adultes qui ont été scolarisés à l'école de langue française à Halifax qui, pour emprunter l'expression, « disparaissent dans le brouillard »? Ayant effectué des entretiens semi-dirigés avec 7 jeunes adultes issus de la communauté de langue française d'Halifax, on constate que les représentations linguistiques vis-à-vis de la langue française sont ambivalentes; Ces représentations sont informées par les diverses expériences personnelles liées au français, notamment par le parcours scolaire à l'école de langue française. Cette expérience scolaire lègue aux participant.e.s un bagage linguistique particulier: elle est à la fois un point rassembleur identitaire pour les participant.e.s et aussi un rappel constant de leur rapport d'altérité avec les identités des majorités, en particulier, les locuteurs de l'anglais à Halifax ainsi que les locuteurs du français venant de milieux où le français est la langue majoritaire. Également, les participant.e.s à l'étude ont tou.te.s exprimé.e.s avoir vécu des conflits avec les idéologies normatives des idéologies linguistiques véhiculées par les institutions de langue française à Halifax, les mettant alors à l'écart des milieux dans lesquels iels ont grandi. Bien qu'iels démontrent une versatilité linguistique entre l'anglais et le français, les participant.e.s de l'étude font preuve d'insécurité linguistique à la fois par une invalidation identitaire et linguistique dans les instances de contact avec des francophones d'ailleurs, mais aussi de la part de la communauté de langue française d'Halifax. Les participant.e.s font partie de deux mondes, tout en étant identifié.e.s comme « autre » dans chacun d'eux. Cela dit, ces représentations linguistiques développées à l'adolescence, qui ont largement informé les trajectoires des participant.e.s quant à la gestion des langues dans leur quotidien, ne sont pas nécessairement déterminantes de leurs représentations et comportements linguistiques à l'âge adulte. La capacité de naviguer différents espaces ayant de différentes influences linguistiques permet aux participant.e.s de construire et s'approprier leurs identités linguistiques à l'âge adulte, de manières uniques et dans les espaces qui comptent pour eux. Or, le fait d'être Emerging Adult, c'est-à-dire, ne pas être ancré de manière fixe dans des circonstances de vie liées aux marqueurs normatifs de la vie adulte, permet aux participant.e.s une flexibilité quant à l'appropriation du français dans leur quotidien, pourvu que ces espaces soient accessibles et linguistiquement inclusifs. Ceci leur permet de tisser un rapport avec la langue française au-delà des expériences vécues lors de leurs années formatrices à l'adolescence.