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Social policy and professional practice across the island of Ireland is dominated by the WHO definition of elder abuse and national and professional interpretations of what constitutes elder abuse. Top-down, generalist knowledge of the abuse of older people have facilitated paternalistic and protectionist policies and services designed to protect older vulnerable adults across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. However, a qualitative study involving 58 older people in six focus groups held across Ireland highlights an alternative understanding of elder abuse grounded in the subjective experiences of older people across urban and rural communities on the island. Indigenous ways of knowing offer a broader and more inclusive understanding of the experience of elder abuse (Lafferty et al., 2012; Dow and Joosten, 2012) together with opportunities for the prevention of ageism and the empowering of older people across the jurisdictions.

A description of how elder abuse is defined at the global and national level is then compared with the findings of an all-Ireland study of older people's older conceptualisation of elder abuse (Begley et al., 2012) at the local level.

Understanding indigenous perceptions of elder abuse has significant implications for the delivery of cultural relevant social policy and professional practice across Ireland.

Given the exploratory nature of this study, there are significant methodological limitations to its replication, the representativeness of the participants involved and the generalisability of the findings.

However, this study provides unique insights about how some older people conceptualised elder abuse across different cultural and political contexts across Ireland as compared with national and global definitions.

The study on older people's conceptualisation of elder abuse was the first all-Ireland attempt to contribute to the body of knowledge on indigenous perspectives on elder abuse.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the case study of an older woman who was subject to elder financial abuse by a home help in the Republic of Ireland.

The design of the research is a case study.

It considers the indicators which alerted professionals to the concerns and the measures taken to protect the woman. The paper particularly highlights the co-operation of the large number of inter-agency multi-disciplinary professionals involved in resolving the case. The paper also considers the issue of capacity and the current legal background in the Republic of Ireland and internationally relevant to protecting older people from elder abuse.

The paper has not identified any published case studies of elder financial abuse within the Republic of Ireland, despite hundreds of cases being reported annually. Case reports may be of interest to those working in the field as a means of describing successful management strategies, and may highlight practical areas of difficulty such as conflict or lack of communication between agencies. They may also serve to heighten awareness of abuse in general.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the support experiences of older people who have been abused in Ireland.

Recruited through dedicated elder abuse services, nine older people who had experienced elder abuse participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using thematic content analysis.

The study highlighted the help-seeking pathways of abused older people and revealed that few older people sought help for themselves and most were unaware of the services available to support and protect older people. Data analysis identified the range and type of help received from family, friends, voluntary and statutory services, as well as the perceived barriers to accessing help and support.

The research did not include abused older people who lacked mental capacity or who had experienced self-neglect, criminal victimisation by strangers or who had not received statutory support services. This field may benefit from future research that seeks to examine the support experiences of these groups.

Family, staff and professionals who care for older people need to be cognisant of the signs of elder abuse, and bring them to the attention of older people should they have concerns, as older people may not always recognise that they are being abused.

The paper contributes to our understanding of the support needs of older people in Ireland and the perceived barriers to accessing help and support.

The purpose of this paper is to examine demographic details, disclosure and reporting behaviour of older women Rape Crisis Centre (RCC) service users in Ireland.

Statistical analysis of 15 Irish RCC records was carried out, using the Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI) statistical database. In addition, two illustrative case studies were examined.

Older women were under-represented as RCC service users in Ireland. They were more likely to be disabled, less likely to report an incident of sexual violence and more likely to delay disclosure than younger women. Older women also had poor knowledge about sexual violence and services available to older women survivors.

Data were drawn from RCCs. Therefore, results may not reflect the population of Ireland as a whole. Population-based studies should be carried out to gauge the prevalence and nature of sexual violence among older women and assess reporting and disclosing behaviours.

The paper provides important indications of barriers to accessing RCC services among older women. Health care providers should receive education and training in identifying survivors of sexual violence among older women and providing referral where needed. RCCs should ensure that services are fully accessible to the disabled.

This paper provides unique data about older women service users which will be of value to those working with older women or in the violence against women and health sectors.

This chapter examines the everyday experiences of short women, focusing on the problems they face and the coping strategies used to navigate being short in a heightist society. Further, this chapter views height as a stigmatized identity, which both negatively and positively impacts short women.

Sixteen qualitative interviews were conducted with women 5′2″ and under.

Using the literature on stress, and coping models laid out by social psychologists, this chapter elucidates the unique place of short women in American society.

While there has been a wealth of literature on how short stature impacts men, research on how short stature impacts women has been scant.

In Northern Ireland, access to good quality palliative care is an accepted and expected part of modern cancer care. The “Transforming Your Palliative and End of Life Care” programme “supports the design and delivery of coordinated services to enable people with palliative and end of life care needs to have choice in their place of care, greater access to services and improved outcomes at the end of their lives”. The purpose of this autoethnography is to share the author’s lived experience so that it might be used to improve services.

Autoethnography is employed as the research method. The author describes her experience of caring for father over the last six months of his life. She explores the tensions between the different players involved in the care of her father and the family and the internal conflict that developed within her as daughter, carer, care coordinator and doctor. Using multiple data sources, selected data entries were explored through reflexive, dyadic interviews to explore the experience and meaning in each story.

The author found that autoethnography was a powerful tool to give voice to the carer experience. Narration can be a powerful tool for capturing the authentic lived experiences of individuals and families and is a tool seldom utilised in integrated care. This account provides an insight into the author's expectations of integrated palliative care, as a designer and implementer and now an academic in integrated care and concludes with some reflections about the gap between policy and practice in palliative care services in Northern Ireland.

Autoethnography can be a powerful tool for capturing the authentic lived experiences of individuals and families and is an essential component of the quadruple aim.

Purpose: We review theory and research to suggest how research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) population health could more completely account for social class.

Approach: First, we review theory on social class, gender, and sexuality, especially pertaining to health. Next, we review research on social class among SGM populations. Then, we review 42 studies of SGM population health that accounted for one or more components of social class. Finally, we suggest future directions for investigating social class as a fundamental driver of SGM health.

Findings: Social class and SGM stigma are both theorized as “fundamental causes” of health, yet most studies of SGM health do not rigorously theorize social class. A few studies control socioeconomic characteristics as mediators of SGM health disparities, but that approach obscures class disparities within SGM populations. Only two of 42 studies we reviewed examined SGM population health at the intersections of social class, gender, and sexuality.

Research implications: Researchers interested in SGM population health would benefit from explicitly stating their chosen theory and operationalization of social class. Techniques such as splitting samples by social class and statistical interactions can help illuminate how social class and SGM status intertwine to influence health.

Originality: We synthesize theory and research on social class, sexuality, and gender pertaining to health. In doing so, we hope to help future research more thoroughly account for social class as a factor shaping the lives and health of SGM people.

The purpose of this paper is to examine restaurant employees’ engagement in identity work to manage occupational stigma consciousness.

Research methods included ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews.

Widespread societal stigma attached to food service work disturbed participants’ sense of coherence. Therefore, they undertook harmonizing their present and envisioned selves with “forever talk,” a form of identity work whereby people discursively construct desired, favorable and positive identities and self-concepts by discussing what they view themselves engaged and not engaged in forever. Participants employed three forever talk strategies: conceptualizing work durations, framing legitimate careers and managing feelings about employment. Consequently, their talk simultaneously resisted and reproduced restaurant work stigmatization. Findings elucidated occupational stigma consciousness, ambivalence about jobs considered “bad,” “dirty” and “not real,” discursive tools for negotiating laudable identities, and costs of equivocal work appraisals.

This study provides a valuable conceptual and theoretical contribution by developing a more comprehensive understanding of occupational stigma consciousness. Moreover, an identity work framework helps explain how and why people shape identities congruent with and supportive of self-concepts. Forever talk operates as a temporal “protect and preserve” reconciliation tool whereby people are able to construct positive self-concepts while holding marginalized, stereotyped and stigmatized jobs. This paper offers a unique empirical case of the ways in which people talk about possible future selves when their employment runs counter to professions normatively evaluated as esteemed and lifelong. Notably, research findings are germane for analyzing any identities (work and non-work related) that pose incoherence between extant and desired selves.