ABSTRACT
The study of ageing has traditionally been wide ranging, involving social scientific and health and social care professional disciplines. It is possible to question the extent to which these disciplines have communicated and combined their efforts in true inter-disciplinary fashions. Still, the academic study of ageing has not lacked sustained and wide-ranging attention and has especially benefited in recent years through the multi-disciplinary study of social gerontology (Hooyman and Kiyak, 2002). One consequence is that it is possible to identify a range of disciplinary perspectives on ageing. These may be related to older people’s use of, and relationships with, particular housing types or social care and health services. They may also be related to features of older people’s social, economic and cultural lives. Cross-cutting both of these disciplinary and subject contexts, older people’s relationships with their environments have been a sustained field of research interest.
