Agency in talk about old age and health

There is a strong drive in ageing research, policy programmes and the media today to promote the agency of older people. In this paper, agency is approached as a discursive and interactional phenomenon. The data consist of group discussions with people aged 70 or over. Although the interviews were designed to focus on questions of health, the participants also raised other topics, including their interests, social activities and social relations. The main focus of the analysis was on the participants' descriptions of themselves and on their scope of action in health issues. The aim was to establish whether being old was constructed as an agentic position and to identify the meanings attached to agency in age-talk. The participants described themselves in agentic terms and agency was assigned diverse meanings, but whenever the category of old was mobilized, agency became problematic.