Social Gerontology

Introduction

Social gerontology , as the term suggests, is concerned with the study of the social aspects of aging and old age. These include a large range of topics, disciplines, and methods requiring a good understanding of the clinical and economic dimensions of aging. This chapter includes the following discussions: individual experiences of aging (e.g., age identities, social networks and supports, life events, coping, and resilience); the social institutions that provide health and social care services to older adults; how old age is socially constructed and the age-related inequalities that flow from this; the factors that drive social and health inequalities in older age, such as class, gender, ethnicity, and race; and the broad social impact of our aging populations. Central to these studies, however, has been a concern to understand the factors that promote or undermine the well-being, or quality of life, of older adults.

Conclusions from research on older adults' quality of life and their clinical implications were well summarized in Hepburn's chapter in a previous edition of this volume, which focused on factors that contribute to social functioning—social status, social connections, occupations, activities, personal resources, and life events. Here we take a broader view of the social context of aging, describing the development of approaches in social gerontology that seek to theorize and understand the aging experience. We illustrate how these ideas have developed in ways that reflect changes in the experience of aging and show how the drivers of these changes relate to social inequalities at older ages. We begin by describing the tendency in social gerontology to problematize the circumstances of later life through accounts of adjustment, disengagement, dependency, and poverty and through a conceptualization of increasing life expectancy in terms of the potential difficulties that are brought about as populations age. We argue that as later life becomes more of a potentially positive experience for greater numbers of people, such an approach is not the most useful way to view old age. We suggest that we are seeing dramatic changes in the experience of aging that need to be understood in terms of changes to the health and wealth of older adults and in terms of the cultural context of cohorts, such as the baby boomer generation, now entering retirement. These “new” older people challenge much of the thinking about old age and how it relates to gerontology, as well as the reordering of later life into what can be referred to as the third and fourth ages. We conclude by returning to the theme of inequality by exploring the heterogeneity of aging experiences and how these relate to class, gender, ethnicity, and race.

The “Problem” of Old Age

As Cole, Achenbaum and Katz have observed, current academic concerns with aging have tended to focus on the problem of old age. The perception of older adults as a social problem has a long history in social and health research, and this preoccupation with the problems of senescence characterizes the development of gerontology, including social gerontology. Katz has quoted the first article in the first issue of the newly established Journal of Gerontology in 1946, which stated that “Gerontology reflects the recognition of a new kind of problem that will increasingly command the interest and devotion of a variety of scientists, scholars, and professional workers.” How this influenced the development of specifically social approaches to later life can be seen with the establishment of a Committee on Social Adjustment in Old Age by the U.S. Social Science Research Council in 1944 and a Research Unit into the Problems of Aging by the Nuffield Foundation (England) in 1946. In this immediate postwar period, Sauvy suggested that Britain's economic difficulties were largely the result of an aging population. Furthermore, he claimed that “The danger of a collapse of western civilization owing to a lack of replacement of its human stock cannot be questioned. Perhaps we ought to regard this organic disease, this lack of vitality of the cells, as a symptom of senility of the body politic itself and thus compare social biology with animal biology.”

This sense of foreboding had been a strong theme driving earlier developments in social policy. The introduction of old age pensions in Britain in 1908 was not only intended to eliminate extreme poverty in old age, but also to lower “poor law” expenditure on older people. By the mid-1920s, the effects of economic turbulence had moved the terms of debate in the direction of the capacity of retirement to alleviate unemployment. In this formulation, removal from active participation in the workforce was the main motivation for retirement, which in time led to a lowering of the retirement age to 65 years.

In the United States, there were similar concerns to take older workers out of the workforce, with the economic depression of the 1930s creating an impetus for change. However, several factors complicated matters, including the fact that most older people in the United States were still employed. In addition, legislators had to deal with the federal structure of the government, the confusing pattern of Civil War pension entitlements for which many were eligible, and the wide array of pension schemes operating across companies and occupations. In this context, the Townsendite movement of the 1930s, named after Dr. Francis E. Townsend, argued for a tax-funded state pension rather than one based on a contributory principle. Furthermore, in advocating the reflationary potential of creating a large number of state-funded consumers, the movement reconceptualized retirement with the slogan “Youth for work, age for leisure.” However, the New Deal and its Social Security pension, when it was established in 1935, was much more conventional in its conception, acting as a poverty alleviation program and as a way of dealing with unemployment by using retirement to release jobs to younger workers.

The identification of the old as a problem that needed to be resolved continued along these lines for much of the second half of the twentieth century, although with different national emphases. In Britain, the tradition that included Rowntree's studies of poverty continued in the work of Townsend and has been a continuing theme of social gerontologists into the twenty-first century. Conversely, in the United States, the successful selling of retirement after World War II led to research initiatives and programs on successful and productive aging, concerned with investigating adaption to the circumstances of retirement. Whatever the national differences, the collection of data to answer questions posed as the problem of aging has continued to the present day, although more recently within the context of population aging and the economic consequences that accompany it. Paradoxically, this has meant that research is now directed at the problems posed by “a rapidly growing population of rather healthy and self-sufficient persons whose collective dependence is now straining the economies of western nations.” We will return to this theme shortly but first will describe the early theoretical perspectives that have underpinned social gerontology.