No abstract

Caregivers in health care should focus more on supporting older persons' meaningfulness in life and how their feelings of security can be strengthened by trusting relationships and activities. In nursing, there should be more focus on developing knowledge of inner health resources, including positive life orientation and meaningfulness in life.

The aim is to analyse political participation among senior citizens in the West-Finnish region Österbotten/Pohjanmaa by using data from the 2005 GERDA (gerontological regional database) survey. The first research question related to patterns of political participation and the extent to which older people in this region engage in voting and non-institutionalised forms of participation. Secondly, the driving forces behind different dimensions of participation were assessed on an individual level by using a modified variant of the civic voluntarism model as suggested by Verba and colleagues. The results show a high propensity to vote among elders in this region, but they also suggest that so-called non-institutionalised participation is likely to become more common in the future. Moreover, even though the results support the so-called resource theory of political participation, the fit of the multivariate models were modest, which necessitates further research in order to understand fully the driving forces behind political participation of older people in this specific region.

This article examines political participation among older adults in österbotten, Finland, and Västerbotten, Sweden. Two specific hypotheses are tested. First, we anticipate that older adults are loyal voters but less avid in engaging in politics between elections. Second, we expect individuallevel resources to explain why older people participate in politics. The article offers two contributions to the literature on political participation of older adults. First, it corroborates earlier findings by showing that older adults indeed have a higher inclination to vote than to engage in political activities between elections, but it also shows that the latter engagement is more diversified than one could expect. Second, although the findings largely support the resource model, they suggest that we need to consider also other factors such as the overall attitude towards older people.

The results imply that social participation and its association with health is moderated by age, whereas interpersonal trust is not.