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This paper considers the education of social and health care professionals who work with and care for older people. It asks whether education can promote the dignity of older people, how this may be done, what factors may ease or impede the promotion of dignity within professional education, and what part education plays alongside other influences on care practices.Beginning with consideration of research on the nature of professional education, the paper reviews principles of professional education, cultures and methods of teaching and learning and processes of practical apprenticeship. The paper argues that there are a number of challenges to the promotion of dignity within professional education, for example, inconsistencies in development of professional values, curriculum contradictions such as those between education for management and for direct care of older people, the balance between theory and practice and education for practice under changing real‐world conditions.

This article reports the results of a survey of local authorities, which asked about progress in responding to the Department of Health guidance, No Secrets. The findings of the survey suggest that the majority of local authorities are taking action in response to the guidance. However, there is variation in progress with the different components of the framework for the protection of vulnerable adults outlined in No Secrets.

The parallels between child abuse and adult abuse have been frequently noted as public awareness of both has increased in recent decades. Both can involve the concealed victimisation of a weaker family member, for both interventions are difficult to implement because practitioners are loath to intrude into the privacy of the family and risk causing harm, and combating abuse of either type demands multi‐agency working. Significant differences between the two abuse constituencies have also been stressed, namely that adults are not invariably dependents reliant for care on the persons mistreating them and have the autonomy to resist efforts to intervene on their behalf.

Research that follows people over a period of time (longitudinal or panel studies) is increasingly recognised as of great importance in helping us to understand the ageing process and changes over time in the lives of older people. If people drop out of studies ‐ which older people are more likely to do ‐ the value of the study diminishes. This research draws on evidence from ongoing and previous longitudinal studies of people aged 55 and over to examine what factors encourage the retention of participants and what causes them to drop out. The research is synthesising existing evidence, drawing together the experiences of researchers involved in longitudinal studies, and collecting some new evidence about the views of survey participants. This article reports on the first part of the research by drawing together evidence from other studies. These show that there are some factors that are related to attrition whereas for others the evidence is mixed. Methods employed by these studies to reduce attrition and retain participants are examined. It must be noted that apart from the consistent finding that attrition is associated with age, education, socio‐economic status and cognitive impairment, not all studies examined the same variables; some only being explored by one study. This makes it difficult to draw any further conclusions and indicates that attrition needs to be addressed in a uniform manner by more studies. This article identifies some implications for policy‐makers and practitioners.

The aim of the study was to further our understanding of the nature of care at home for people with dementia, with particular emphasis on routines, control and care goals. Its objective was to examine the nature of care as a form of social organisation in the home of people with dementia whose care was at least partly provided by relatives or friends. Twenty situations were included in which the carers and people with dementia were interviewed. Each participating pair was observed for an average of nine hours.Findings cover the ways in which carers and people with dementia accomplished personal and household care through routines and exerting control, and how they dealt with aspects like setting and matching care goals. Accomplishing care is shown to be a major challenge for people with dementia and their caregivers, yet in most cases participants developed effective coping strategies. Three themes emerged from the findings: handling competing goals or means to goals, controlling the situation and maintaining a preferred sense of self. This study shows that observational research in the homes of people with dementia is feasible and, when combined with conversational interviewing, is valuable in understanding the processes of caring and what it means to live with dementia. The expertise of carers and care‐receivers in managing home care has been identified. Policies and practices that acknowledge such expertise will go some way towards encouraging and helping people to continue, and rewarding them for the vital part they play.

The growing proportion of older people in the United Kingdom requires policies that are cost‐effective and responsive to their needs. Both these factors have led to growing emphasis on policies which enable older people to remain in homes of their own. Older people are becoming more vociferous in expressing their views and are being encouraged to do this. This article reports on three pieces of research funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) which have attempted to draw on the views of older people about assistive technology and its role in staying at home policies.

Five years ago a conference on Children and Marriage would probably not have included a paper on marriages without children. Having children in marriage conforms to one of society's strongest expectations; conversely not having any is portrayed as both undesirable and deviant. Society's prescriptions relating to parenthood have given rise to a number of assumptions about childless marriages. Briefly, these maintain that the causes of childlessness are almost always involuntary, that marriages without children will be less satisfactory and more prone to divorce than parental marriages, and that childlessness is generally associated negatively with various measures of mental health. It is only recently that such assumptions have been questioned, and that voluntary childlessness has become a subject of research in its own right, rather than as an aberration from the “normal” pattern of behaviour. In Britain three chief reasons for an upsurge in interest in childless by choice marriages are apparent. Firstly, there have been indications that couples are delaying childbirth in marriage and this has led to speculation that in some cases, at least, this delay would lead to higher rates of childlessness when this cohort of women had completed childbearing. Figure 1 illustrates both this trend and the fact that in the past high rates of childlessness in early marriage were associated with high rates of final childlessness. Secondly, in 1976 a pressure group was formed by some voluntarily childless individuals; its aim was to campaign for a reduction in pronatalist pressure in society. This group attracted a good deal of interest from the popular press and in the late seventies and early eighties many articles looking at various aspects of voluntary childlessness have been published. Thirdly, and most significantly, voluntary childlessness represents an alternative family form and has come into the realm of sociological studies of the family along with other lifestyles (such as one‐parent families or homosexual couples) that were once considered deviant and therefore outside the mainstream of society. It is now recognised that such living arrangements are both valid as subjects for study in their own right and in terms of the understanding they may give of more traditional arrangements.