"This is the first book to address the issue of ageing after a long life with disability. It breaks new ground through its particular life course perspective, examining what it means to age with a physical or mental disability and what the implications are of 'becoming old' for people who have had extensive disabilities for many years. These people may have had to leave the labour market early, and the book looks at available care resources, both formal and informal. Ageing with disability challenges set ideas about successful ageing, as well as some of those about disabilities. The life course approach that is used unfolds important insights about the impact of multiple disabilities over time and on the phases of life. The book highlights the meaning of care in unexplored contexts, such as where ageing parents are caregivers or regarding mutual care in disabled couples. These are areas of knowledge which have, to date, been totally neglected."--Publisher's website.

This article discusses conjoint interviews and takes its starting point from a study with nine older couples who have been living with disabilities for a long period of time. Conjoint interviewing where dyads are interviewed together produces a different kind of data from individual interviews – specifically data that conduce different ways of talking about “we-ness” and produce interaction between the participants. This article discusses how this appeared in a study that was interested in the understandings and actualizations of spousal care when both have a disability or illness. The method leads to an analysis centered on mutuality and has potential to problematize traditional caring tasks and caring roles in the context of living with disability or chronic illness. Potentials and limitations of the method are discussed.

This article explores mutual caregiving between older spouses aging with physical disabilities. Nine older couples, where both partners had lived long lives with physical disabilities, were interviewed as dyads about mutual caregiving. The couples not only had access to different kinds and degrees of formal support but also provided mutual care to each other in a variety of ways. Interview coding using grounded theory led to two overarching categories from which motivation for mutual caregiving could be understood. These categories were Mutual care as freedom and Mutual care as imperative. The results extend understanding about how older couples with disabilities attached meaning to their mutual caregiving, and why mutual care was sometimes preferable, despite the availability of other sources of help and despite practical difficulties of providing this help. These findings suggest that health care professionals need to be sensitive to the dynamics of the couple relationship and carefully explore the couple’s preferences for how formal support can best be provided in ways that honor and sustain the integrity of the couple relationship

In a study where older couples who had lived long lives with physical disabilities were interviewed about mutual care, an unexpected finding that while the couples reported worsening disabilities, they also described themselves as advantaged, and as maintaining a high level of activity in some areas of life. In this article, we investigate how the couples achieve this sense of ageing successfully when the participants’ stories of physical decline, from an outsider’s perspective, might be thought to produce double-, triple- or multiple jeopardy. The results show how the couples use different types of reference groups and refer to various resources to frame themselves as privileged. Furthermore, through environmental adaptations, technical aids and supportive services, they managed to maintain a high level of activity, despite living with disabilities. Notably, the couples described themselves as advantaged by referring to being older, to the long life with disabilities and to ageing with disabilities together. The overarching ambition of the article is to problematize established notions of successful ageing. Considering that the couples referred to the very conditions that might be seen as disadvantageous,  the problem of pre-defined criteria for successful ageing becomes particularly apparent.