Older people, who have the major share of chronic illness, are also especially likely to encounter problems in carrying out regimens. The regimens themselves may be exhausting or complex. In addition, regimen management in the home takes place within a context characterised by personal and environmental, as well as illness related conditions. There is an interplay between this context and the illness management, giving rise often to problems of ‘overload’ and a ‘contest for control of management’. These may interfere not only with the management of regimens but have consequences for couples' personal lives and their marital relationships as well.

Service providers are able by virtue of the nature of their work to shape how services operate and to influence who receives them. Of the many occupational groups involved in delivering care to the elderly general practitioners perform a pivotal role. While the ‘gatekeeper’ function of GPs is widely acknowledged there is little understanding of how this is actually performed or of the criteria underpinning decisions in regard to referrals and admissions. Old people display a complex of presenting conditions both physical and social with which the GP has to contend. At the same time services do not operate in isolation but interact in many subtle and not so subtle ways. To illustrate these themes the paper identifies and explores a set of considerations that appear to influence a group of GPs' use of services when referring patients to the geriatric service and admitting them to local hospital beds under their control.

Content analysis of wills probated in New York State between 1704 and 1799 is used to reconstruct the family relations of aged colonial Jews. The modernisation theory of ageing provides a backdrop for this beginning effort to specify variations in family life in history. In general, regardless of marital status, aged Jewish colonial testators followed a familistic inheritance pattern. Individual wills contained articulated and vindictive bequests. It is suggested that while the Jewish family was an important mechanism for maintaining cultural cohesion and identity, it was also an important support structure in adapting to the realities of a Christian colonial America that was rapidly modernising. Future work in the history of the family relations of aged individuals will have to be comparative.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the difficulties elderly taxpayers experience when complying with the tax system operated in the United Kingdom. Some of these problems arise from particular characteristics of the UK system, which are difficult for taxpayers to understand. Results from the survey reported here point to disproportionately high compliance costs experienced by elderly and recently retired taxpayers. The policy implications of these findings are discussed in terms of such matters as the improved distribution of explanatory leaflets and the need for simplification and improved comprehensibility of tax and other bureaucratic literature. Throughout the paper comparisons are drawn particularly between Britain and the USA.