Retirement villages are a model of extra-care housing, offering purpose-designed housing that incorporates both care services and a range of non-care-related facilities and activities. These generate opportunities for formal and informal social activity, and promote community engagement, solidarity between residents, and active and independent ageing. Providers suggest that retirement villages are able to foster an environment rich in social capital. This study's purpose is to review and summarise key findings on the topic of social capital in retirement villages in the gerontological literature. Social capital is defined as both an individual attribute of single actors and a feature of communities as a whole. A clear conceptualisation of social capital is used to organise the reviewed studies along different dimensions: on an individual level, social networks, trustworthiness and obligations are differentiated, while the collective level distinguishes between system control, system trust and system morality. Thirty-four studies are reviewed. While retirement villages are generally described as friendly places with widespread helping behaviour where new friends are made, research has also highlighted the difficulty of socially integrating the frail and very old. While, in particular, social networks and system morality have received much attention, there is a clear need for future research into the other domains of social capital.

Many Western societies experience recurring patterns of violence against ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, and other asylum seekers, making it important to better understand which conditions increase (or decrease) the likelihood of hate crimes. In this article, we test the relevance of different geographic, social, economic, and political conditions for attacks on refugees. To this end, we conduct an event-history analysis for Germany between 2014 and 2017, when Germany experienced a sharp rise and subsequent decline in assaults on refugees with up to 142 personal and miscellaneous (such as assaults and insults) and 11 arson attacks on refugee homes and refugees per week. We analyse these incidents at the district level and derive hypotheses from theoretical considerations on geographic proximity, social similarity, political opportunity structures, competition for resources, opportunities of contact with foreigners, and differences between East and West Germany. Irrespective of the type of attack, the results of Cox regression models support our theoretical reasoning on diffusion processes, geographical proximity, and the contact hypothesis. There is no support for the model-adopter similarity and competition-for-resources hypothesis. The type of violence matters with regard to the importance of political opportunity structures and differences between East and West Germany. Our findings show the importance of differentiating between different types of violence and accounting for the context-dependency of ethnic violence for future research.

How to cite:Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.