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Biståndshandläggarna spelar en nyckelroll i att belysa sociala behov som kan leda till medicinska problem och i att påtala ålderistiska tendenser i regelverken, skriver flera forskare.

Introduction: The life course describes the progression of life as a social role, from birth to death. Traditional Western life-history studies of the life course usually describe a continuous lifeline with occasional interruptions in between. The extraordinary temporal events of the Anti-Japanese War (AJW), Civil War (CW), Great Famine (GF), Cultural Revolution (CR), and the Reform and Opening-up of China in just few decades mean that the life history of contemporary Chinese older adults may be quite different from those of their western peers.

Methods: The study used qualitative research methods to conduct in-depth interviews with 16 older adults and collect their life stories through a standardized list of questions. Grounded theory was employed to condense, compare, conceptualize, and synthesize patterns within the collected data, approaching the investigation with a “naturalistic” perspective.

Results: Based on a generalized analysis of the Interview transcripts, we can find that Chinese old adults’ life stories were shaped by recurring exceptional and rapidly changing environmental conditions. The themes and sub-themes of Chinese old adults’ life stories were focus on (1) violence, loss of family member, escape and unstable life in their early life which are related to AJW and CW; (2) poverty and starvation in daily life when they were adolescents and young adults which are related to GF; (3) discontinuity, timed opportunities, categorizations in order to split the social relationships and networks in CR. The data also suggest that education is an important part of the life story and that its value changes over time.

Discussion: The discontinuity and instability of the life stories of the Chinese old adults are unexpected according to the dominant Western-influenced life course theories, which enriches life course theory and provides a new perspective for studying the individual life course in a society of constant and rapid change.

The aim of the article is to analyse and problematize care managers’ argumentation of individual needs when assessing migrant customers within Swedish public elderly home care services. According to legislation, need for assistance should always be assessed individually. In recent decades of service decline, standardization of needs has been part of the distribution of elderly care services. Simultaneously, the stratum of older people has become more diverse, which means that a wider spectrum of needs is presented to the care managers. Ten interviews with care managers were analysed with a focus on their arguments regarding the care needs of elderly people with migrant backgrounds seeking assistance. The theoretical conceptions of the two perspectives of care and services were used to analyse the understanding of care managers’ arguments. Our analysis shows that the service perspective with assistance and support that are standardized for Swedes is poorly suited to people born outside Sweden and socialized into other expectations of family and society. The meaning of individual needs was imprecise and contradictory when confronted with diverse cultural codes. When general standards were used in the arguments by referring to regulations and local guidelines, immigrants’ individual needs were not prioritized. Our analysis suggests that the tension between national standards, local guidelines and individual needs has to be discussed further, where theoretical tools related to care and services may be useful in guiding care managers’ professional arguments of individual needs and cultural sensitivity in the needs assessment.