SOC035:
Lesson 02: Overview: Aging is Not About a Long Life
Overview: Aging is Not About a Long Life
Reading Assignment
See course schedule.
Number of Resident Lectures: 1
Learning Objectives
After completing the textbook reading assignment and the content lesson, you should be able to achieve the following objectives:
- Define and explain sociological aging.
- Use Roberts’ (1978) four criteria to explain how one can consider aging a social problem.
- Identify the three primary facets of the social construction of aging.
- Explain the difference between cross-sectional and longitudinal research study designs.
Key Terms
age norms |
roles |
Overview
A sociological perspective does not often come easily because it requires looking at the world in a very unaccustomed way. In our everyday lives, we deal with individuals on a personal basis, whether they are members of our family or strangers in the grocery store. However, a sociological perspective requires moving beyond a single person to look at the common behaviors and experiences of many people. It also requires looking at how the actions of individuals cumulate into the social structure. The phrase "the whole is more than the sum of its parts” is a good way to think about sociology.
Given this unfamiliarity with a sociological perspective, we need to spend a bit of time on what it means to study aging from a sociological perspective. This is especially important because many of us have only secondary knowledge of what being an older person in U.S. society entails. We begin with an overview of how U.S. society defines aging and then consider why that creates a social problem.
Defining Aging: Chronological and Biological Age
We all hold a specific idea of what "aging" means, usually based on our individual experiences with parents, grandparents, or other older relatives. As an example of this, I would like you to list eight adjectives or qualities that come to mind when you think about "aging." Write whatever comes to mind in the space below.
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What items do you have on your list?
You probably have words like "old," "65," "dependent," "frail," "retired," "gray hair," "golfing," "grandparent," "Alzheimer’s disease," "wrinkles," "bus trips to Atlantic City," "nursing home," "bingo," and "golden years." Let us think a minute about what these words say about our values and expectations of aging.
First, notice that you likely have indicated a chronological age that you associate with the start of "aging," the number of birthdays that have to pass before one becomes "old." Since the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, age 65 has increasingly come to define when one becomes aged because that is when individuals qualify for full income-maintenance payments under the current benefit scheme. As we will discuss later in this course, the near-universal coverage under the Social Security system means that this age is meaningful for almost the whole population. Many private pension programs also use 65 as the age criterion for benefits as well, another testament to its pervasiveness. However, as we will see in this course, chronological age does little more than define the passage of time, as the more salient aspects of "aging" are not strictly determined by chronological age.
Second, you have also likely listed some physical changes, such as graying hair, wrinkles, menopause and the loss of various functional abilities that lead to "dependence." Although biological aging is an inevitable process that occurs from the moment that we are born, we often do not think of the changes earlier in the lifespan as "aging" per se. Growth during childhood certainly is part of the aging process, but we tend to equate aging with physical decline. For example, many middle-aged adults, those in their 40s and 50s, identify Alzheimer’s disease as a dominant fear about growing older—an indication of just how much we equate decline with aging. These physiological changes tend to coincide with our chronological age, but the rate of biological aging varies from person to person. Can you ever recall having met someone who "looked young" for his or her age? This is a statement about biological aging. This is often one of the most salient aspects of aging in our culture as is evidenced by the plethora of cosmetic products designed to "erase wrinkles" and "stop balding," and by the rapid increase in cosmetic surgery designed to keep skin taut and bodies lean. Although a great deal of recent research has shown that many of these physical declines are not inevitable, and are linked to lifestyle and stress, we continue to think that declines in physical functioning are the defining characteristic of aging. Thus in addition to chronological age, we all hold assumptions about how older persons look and function—ideas about biological aging.
Defining Aging: Sociological Aging
The third aspect of aging that is likely evident in your list deals with the social statuses older adults occupy and the activities in which they engage. Before we can talk specifically about this third image of aging, the one at the foundation of this course, we must deal with some basic terminology.
We can think about social status as the recognized position that a person holds in society. We all occupy certain statuses. For example, by taking this course you are occupying the status of "student.” The student status carries with it expectations about behaviors which are known as a social role. Roles are scripts for positions in society, which include rights, responsibilities, and activities such as the expectation of working on assignments, synthesizing knowledge, and taking exams. Moreover, we usually think of the student status in relation to the "instructor” or "teacher” status. In other words, we define statuses in relation to their designated rights, activities, and obligations to other social roles. In our example, the instructor expects the student to follow assignment directions and the students expect the instructor to grade the assignments in a fair and impartial manner. These statuses often occur in hierarchical arrangements to reflect the level of importance associated with each role—the instructor status is more prestigious than the student status because the instructor role contains more rights and responsibilities.
Now turn again to the remaining items on our list. These items reflect our shared expectations about the social statuses that older adults occupy. Here, "retired” and "grandparent” are easily identifiable statuses. Moreover, the activities of "bingo,” "golf,” and "bus trips” also suggest a social role based on the availability of unstructured time to pursue individual interests and hobbies. These expected behaviors are associated with the leisure role. The retirement status frequently implies the leisure role because there is the expectation that with freedom from the time constraints of the worker role one has the time to pursue leisure activities. However, as we will see in this course, retirement does not always mean one is free of other time-demanding obligations or is functionally able to lead a leisurely lifestyle.
The statuses and associated roles that we associate with aging also assume something about when it is appropriate to occupy these statuses. Recall that when we were discussing biological aging, we made the point that we tend to link physical changes to certain chronological ages. We make a similar association between various statuses and chronological aging, particularly retirement and grandparenthood. Consider these questions: "How old are you when you typically become a grandparent?” "What age should one be when he or she retires?” It is unlikely that you would consider 25 or 30 years of age to be the usual age at which one becomes a grandparent or retires—we would say he or she is "too young.” Likewise, we generally would also consider 75 "too old” to begin one’s first job and assume the worker role. Thus, many statuses carry with them implicit age norms—expectations about the chronological age that a person must be to occupy a given status and its associated roles. We note that there is no clear age norm for the leisure role, in part because it is an American ideal to be "successful” enough not to need to work. Much like biological aging though, chronological age and social statuses are loosely correlated and there is a good deal of variation in when people enter the statuses that we identify with aging.
If we juxtapose these broader images of aging—chronological age, biological functioning, and social roles—we quickly notice that they present conflicting ideas about what it means to grow older in the U.S. On one hand, we have the image of aging as the "golden years;” a time when we are no longer bound by full-time work and parenting. The new social statuses that may come with age—grandparenthood, retirement, and leisure—all contain less structure and fewer associated role obligations than those statuses occupied earlier in the life course. On the other hand, we also have an image of aging as a time of increasing frailty and the loss of physical and cognitive independence. These two images are largely incongruent. Despite their seeming contradiction, both images are presented by the mass media and the dominant culture. We simultaneously see elders as in need of assistance and able to lead lives of luxury. This is the context in which aging takes place in our society.
In this course, we are interested in the process by which we come to associate these contradictory images with aging—that is sociological aging. More specifically, your text defines sociological aging as "the process defining appropriate behavior patterns constructed from the expectations and belief systems of the structural characteristics of society” (Matcha 1997:4). What does this mean? This means that the values we place on aging are socially constructed, and do not come from qualities that are due solely to the age of the individual. Simply put, aging is more than a long life. Rather, how we define aging is the result of the complex interplay between various structures of society—the family, the economy, the government, and the medical establishment. These contradictory images of aging result because these institutions have disparate beliefs about and expectations of older individuals. These conflicts result in role ambiguity, the lack of a clear universal script for older adults, and lead us to classify aging as a social problem.