The author deals with the issue of family relationships and the exchange of help and support within a family. She analyses the development of theoretical studies of this problem in Western sociology in the past ten years. The article is linked to a previous article the author published in the Czech Sociological Review in 1996, in which she summarised the preceding decade. This time the article is not conceived as a 'classical' survey, but instead the author deliberately selects and presents the approaches, perspectives, theories and concepts of relational support in order to identify the main feature of theoretical development in the given period, which in the author's opinion is a tendency to try to overcome the still strong influence of the theory of structural functionalism and its normative concept of relationships between family generations. The logical framework of the analysis is formed by a confrontation between the model of intergenerational solidarity and the alternative concept of ambivalence that is currently asserting itself. In the article the author also refers to the results of her empirical research and links them to the concept of ambivalence in relation to interpretative sociology.
The article deals with poverty in old age, which the author studies through the concept of social roles or social status. She analyses data from a qualitative empirical study in order to understand how various aspects of poverty in old age and the status of being poor impact seniors’ performance of social roles. The author approaches poverty and old age as stigmas and looks at the ways in which seniors living in poverty defend their identity against inferior status. The article explains how the role of a poor senior is performed, whether and how poverty affects the roles that poor seniors share with other seniors, and whether the ascriptive status of old age or the objectively low social status of poverty is more significant for the performance of their role. Drawing on the results of her analysis the author describes poverty as the ‘master status’: poverty is an undesirable status for seniors and strategies for defending their identity against the stigma of poverty pushes the strategies of defence against the stigma of old age into the background. The author argues that setting old age in the context of poverty reveals the limitations of some theories in the fi eld socio-gerontology.
This article examines the issue of siblinghood in older age. The author starts by referring to sociological studies criticising the a-theoricity of empirical research in this field. She proceeds to analyse the most influential theoretical approaches used to study relationships between parents and their adult children (i.e. the theory of intergenerational solidarity and the theory/ concept of intergenerational ambivalence) and to critically assess their potential to serve as a guideline for empirical research on siblinghood and provide a framework for interpreting research findings on intragenerational/sibling relationships. The article devotes more space to the concept of ambivalence, which, the author argues, is a more appropriate approach for exploring relationships between older siblings. It also presents a basic overview of the state of empirical knowledge on adult siblinghood.