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BOOK REVIEW |
Director, Scripps Gerontology Center Miami University Oxford, OH 45056
Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (5th ed.), edited by Robert H. Binstock and Linda K. George. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 2001, 513pp., $59.95 (paper).
Like its predecessors, the fifth edition of the Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, edited by Robert H. Binstock and Linda K. George, has two intended audiences: (1) researchers, professional practitioners, and students in the field, and (2) other scholars and professionals who are not currently engaged in research and practice directly focused on the aged and aging but should find it a useful reference tool. Both audiences look to the Handbook as a state-of-the-art summary of the field, capturing the breadth and depth of the field. The Handbook is indeed a rich source of reference materials, analytical and conceptually based summaries and reviews related to substantive topics, theoretical perspectives, and methodological developments.
For those in the field, the Handbook can also serve a more reflective role as a conceptual map of the organizing concepts and frameworks that underlie scholarship in social gerontology. The new edition of the Handbook particularly invites this broader perspective because it has now been a quarter of a century since the publication of the very first Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (Binstock & Shanas, 1976). From this historical perspective, we can consider the contours of the map and the way in which the terrain has shifted over the past 25 years.
The following discussion considers these two contributions of the fifth edition of the Handbook. The volume provides a well-crafted representation of the dominant themes, issues, techniques, and perspectives in our current thinking. It is also a product of the gradual and often implicit changes that have occurred in the view we take of the field, and it can serve as an agent of paradigm definition and as a harbinger of future changes.
Coming of Age: Theory, Methods, and Substance
The field of aging has matured considerably over the past several decades, with an exponentially accumulating body of knowledge, an increasing number of academic institutions offering courses and degrees in gerontology, the publication of several encyclopedias of aging, the emergence of doctoral degree programs in gerontology, and at least three identifiable generations of scholars at work in the field. Editors Binstock and George explicitly acknowledge this evolution of the field by including a number of new contributors to this edition; the growth of substantive specialties and information in the field is marked by the number of new topics in this edition. Because the Handbook is not intended to be an encyclopedia, a decision to add new content means a decision to eliminate other topics. The editors deal with this dilemma of "too much content, not enough chapters" by pointing out that no edition of the Handbook is intended to stand alone as a summary of the field and that it doesn't make sense to repeatedly review the same substantive areas in each edition. For selected audiences of the Handbook, the choices of what was included and what was displaced in this edition may be problematic. Readers interested in political economy, social protection as a model for analyzing policies in aging, or law and ethics will be disappointed in their absence, while readers interested in demography, geographical distribution and migration, role transitions, the aging self in social contexts, social support, the social psychology of aging, historical perspectives on aging, and end of life will be pleased with the new additions. For the purposes of this review, it is the growing depth and scope of knowledge—taken as a marker of maturation of the field—that is at issue.
Beyond the new topics and new generations of scholars, and the increasing range of knowledge represented in the book, the level of discussion about theory and the developments in research methods suggest a field that is coming of age. In their chapter, Gunhild O. Hagestad and Dale Dannefer provide an outstanding overview of the conceptual and theoretical developments in the field, offering summary, critique, and direction. The authors note an overarching "problem-centered microfocus" that currently dominates the field, along with a notable lack of attention given to structural influences. They provide a coherent and compelling argument for the life course perspective as a central organizing framework, acknowledging the lifelong interplay of structural forces and human agency in shaping the experiences of later life. Incorporating micro- and macro- level influences, the life course framework may be, in a broad sense, conceptually complete. Yet it is pragmatically challenging, as the authors clearly spell out. The tension between micro and macro perspectives is not resolved simply by virtue of acknowledging the importance of each. The "problem of levels," including the difficulties inherent in understanding individual lives at a macro level and in making links across levels, is clearly articulated, as is the necessity for making the effort.
There are two methods chapters in this Handbook. A chapter by Duane F. Alwin and Richard T. Campbell gives an overview of quantitative methods designed for longitudinal study of aging and human development, including inter-individual differences and intra-individual change. This chapter discusses basic issues of sampling, measurement, and design as well as the conceptual and empirical challenge of assessing change. The chapter is nicely organized and provides a thorough, clear overview of the methodological issues inherent in studying change over time. In addition, the chapter mentions new methods such as mixed effects models that hold promise for research agendas based on micro/macro life course models; such research embeds individuals in multiple contexts and must include data from all of these levels.
In the second methods chapter, Burt Singer and Carol D. Ryff raise the interesting possibility of moving beyond triangulation of methods to blending qualitative and quantitative approaches ("integrating numbers and narrative"). They describe the use of survey data to create narratives, quantifying themes from text analysis, and using a sophisticated quantitative technique (grade of membership) to create profiles and identify subgroups of interest, all with a focus on creating person-centered understandings. Although the idea underlying this chapter is creative, intriguing, and promising, the fundamental differences in the assumptions underlying, and the purposes of, quantitative and qualitative research need to be examined carefully. These assumptions—about the very nature of reality and how we come to know it—obviously shape the information that is gathered. Multiple uses of data, and possibilities for enriching our understanding by blending the two approaches, is an exciting prospect, but we may not be quite ready for this direction. The inclusion of this innovative chapter without a chapter that provides a basic overview of qualitative methods probably overestimates the degree of understanding and acceptance of the rigors of qualitative research. In a field increasingly dominated by issues of meaning, context, and variations in experience, qualitative methods and grounded theory deserve a chapter of their own, to do justice to the credibility and value of these approaches in their own right.
Many of the substantive chapters in the Handbook focus on the life course, developing more fully the meanings, dimensions, and heuristic value of this approach. Chapters on the gendered life course (by Phyllis Moen), the aging self and social context (by Roseann Giarusso, J. Beth Mabry, and Vern L. Bengtson), and stratification and the life course (by Angela M. O'Rand) explicitly discuss the life course approach and offer greater depth to our understanding of the dimensions of this fundamental social construction. Kenneth F. Ferraro's chapter on role transitions provides a discussion of the structure of the life course itself, identifying role transitions and stages. Other chapters provide reviews of major life course dimensions, including work and retirement (by John C. Henretta) and caregiving by adult children (by Leonard I. Pearlin, Mark F. Pioli, and Amy E. McLaughlin). In the chapter on stratification, O'Rand develops the idea of life course capital to capture the multiple and complex dimensions of stratification over the life course. Life course capital includes human capital (productive capacities), which can help us analyze how opportunities for work are allocated throughout life stages. The chapter discusses the other forms of capital—social (relationships), psychophysical (health stock), and personal (identity and efficacy)—which are distributed unequally and operate interdependently to produce varying experiences of aging. Other chapters also deal with dimensions of inequality and variations in experiences of age: as influenced by race, ethnicity, and culture (by David R. Williams and Colwick M. Wilson); as mediated by social support (by Neal Krause); and, in the case of health, as explained by social-psychological models and constructs (by George). Still others provide historical and anthropological perspectives (by the late Tamara K. Hareven and by Charlotte Ikels and Cynthia M. Beall, respectively).
Additional chapters summarize knowledge and perspectives on large-scale social forces, social institutions, and "interventions," including the demography of aging (by Mark D. Hayward and Shenmei Zhang) and its social and economic implications (by William J. Serow); migration (by Charles F. Longino, Jr.); health care (by Robert L. Kane and Rosalie A. Kane, and by Judith Feder, Harriet L. Komisar, and Marlene Niefeld); politics (by Binstock and Jill Quadagno); economic status (by William Crown) and economic security policies (by Eric R. Kingson and John B. Williamson); and housing and living arrangements (by George L. Maddox). In the concluding chapter, Stephen J. Cutler and Jon Hendricks use an historical perspective to identify the emerging social trends that are likely to affect older people and to be more prominent in our research agendas. They discuss work, retirement, and voluntary participation in the labor force, as well as the enormously important explosive growth of information and technology. Using influential concepts from the field such as cohort norms, structural lag, and ethnicity, Cutler and Hendricks sensitize us to the research and policy issues that will arise as generations of aging people confront significant social change. These macro-level chapters provide an essential piece to the evolving life course framework that brings together the vast majority of this work. This perspective allows for human agency at the same time that it acknowledges the powerful impact of social forces, stratification, and social location.
With the caveat that not every chapter can be detailed in this review nor essentially captured in any generalization, what vision of the field is conveyed by this Handbook? The book portrays a field characterized by a reflective maturity in theory, sophistication in methods, a high degree of breadth and depth in topical areas, and scholars able to offer historical and analytical reviews of those areas. Substantively, the book focuses largely on two areas: the life course and social institutions. The paradigm that is conveyed is of age as deeply embedded in social structure and in a system of stratification, interacting with other dimensions of social location, including gender, race, and ethnicity. The experience of aging is produced by those intersections of dimensions of location, affected by social institutions, and given meaning through a sense of human agency.
Changing Contours of the Field
How does this view of the field differ from that revealed in the first edition of the Handbook in 1976? How has the terrain changed, particularly over the past 25 years? Ferraro (2000) describes the very early days of the field as a time when aging was seen as an inevitably negative process, associated with physical decline and social loss, defined as a social problem; this paradigm provided the scientific basis for an era of policies for the needy and deserving older population. Those early years were also characterized by a heavy focus on individual behaviors and adaptations. In a volume that was a contemporary of Clark Tibbitts's (1960) Handbook of Social Gerontology and predated the first edition of the Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, Robert Kastenbaum (1964) offered New Thoughts on Old Age. The subject matter of his book very much reflected the paradigm described by Ferraro, as well as the author's training in psychology. Even though the volume was framed as an overview of the field, a majority of chapters dealt with personal adaptation and clinical interventions for those who were not adapting successfully.
The first edition of the Handbook (Binstock & Shanas, 1976) was much more multidisciplinary than the Kastenbaum book and had a much stronger emphasis on social structures. Even with greater breadth, however, the book was clearly influenced by the "aging as a problem" paradigm. The paradigm of the first edition heavily emphasized the aged and aging as social problem; it drew upon the sociological imagination because many scholars at that time were interested in understanding the personal troubles of older people as a social problem (Maddox & Wiley, 1976). That edition also included attention to behaviors and adaptations in later life, and it showed an emerging interest in the social issues posed by an aging population. In their opening chapter, Maddox and Wiley identified the following as important themes and issues: aging and social integration (in which they review the opportunities for full involvement of older people in society); successful adaptation; age as social characteristic; society as succession of cohorts; and the influence of environment on aging.
In addition to Ferraro's (2000) discussion of our changing paradigms in the field, one can use the "generations of theory" identified by Hendricks and Achenbaum (1999) to reflect on the evolution of the field. They name three generations of theory in social gerontology, describing the first-generation theories as centering on the impact of age on activity and life satisfaction. Second-generation theories turned attention to the ways in which changing structural conditions dictate the parameters of aging and the situation of the aged as a category. The first edition of the Handbook clearly mirrored these perspectives.
Ferraro (2000) depicts the second phase in the development of our gerontological imagination as a focus on aging as normal. Based on research from the earlier phase, we learned that the predictive value of age was weak, and that the experience of aging was a mix of positive and negative. From an interest in the ways in which aging causes problems, we moved to an understanding of old age as a normal part of the human life cycle and sought to understand the "typical" aging person and his or her everyday life. Research based on this paradigm definitively showed that the processes of aging are complex, modifiable, and variable, and that heterogeneity among older people was so significant that describing the typical older person was not a reasonable or desirable goal. This awareness meant that the "aging as normal" paradigm required refinement. Dannefer (1988) offered such a refinement. He acknowledged that attempting to establish age as a powerful influence and as a predictive variable was important in the early identity of the field. However, he gently and compellingly advised, the next level of questions should not focus on what age causes, but rather on the ways in which the experiences of aging and later life are differentiated and patterned by social location. He suggested that diversity among older people should become our new dependent variable—how much diversity, on what dimensions, related to which social characteristics, and produced by what social forces. Essentially, he was naming our next paradigm, moving from age as causal to age as a mediating or contextual variable.
The third generation of theory accompanies this new diversity paradigm. These theories are attempting to synthesize the micro and macro perspectives that defined, respectively, the first two generations, acknowledging the impact of both structural factors and human agency in determining the variable experiences of aging. The fifth edition of the Handbook is a clear illustration of this stage in the evolution of the field.
These overviews of the field are extremely useful as we consider the changing views of our subject matter and the multiple dimensions and complexities of aging that we seek to understand. Bengtson, Rice, and Johnson (1999) have suggested that theories (and, by extension, research) about aging focus on one of three concepts: age, the aged, or aging. Age refers to a dimension of experience or aspect of social location, aged to group membership, and aging to human development over time. Although this typology identifies the conceptual meanings of age, Hendricks and Achenbaum's (1999) formulation draws attention to the different ways in which age (in its various conceptual cloaks) can operate. In first-generation theories, age was assumed to be an independent variable that influenced social psychological dimensions such as adaptation and life satisfaction. In second-generation theories, age is no longer the predictive variable. Rather, we sought to understand the features of social structure that influence the experience of aging. In this case, age is a dimension of social location or a qualification for group membership. As the field has developed, and as research has been driven by the paradigms underlying second- and third- generation theories, the focus is on understanding the diversity of experiences in later life and the numerous factors that shape that experience—human agency, age norms, social policies, political and economic structures, and the intersecting conditions of social location (age, race, class, gender, ethnicity).
Age Matters
Our challenge is to be explicit about our fundamental view of the field: purposes, central issues and assumptions, essential features, and burning questions. Taken together, Hendricks and Achenbaum (1999), Bengtson and colleagues (1999), and Ferraro (2000) help sharpen the questions about the phenomena we are trying to understand. There are two related fundamental questions. First, why does age matter? Are we interested in group membership, human development, or social location and dimensions of experience? Second, how does age matter? Put another way, what exactly is the conceptual meaning of age in our theory and our research? Is it an independent variable, a competing cause of outcomes such as life satisfaction and health? Or is it a mediating variable, interacting with other dimensions of social location to produce later life experiences? Or is it a marker for group membership, signaling the likelihood of problems and/or eligibility for programs and services? Depending on how we think age is operating; we can conceptualize age as a causal variable, a contextual variable, a threshold or categorical variable, a proxy for stage, or a transition within the life course. Or is it a variable capturing several of these possible meanings?
What does the Handbook suggest about where we are with these fundamental issues? As noted, it is an excellent representation of the third generation of theory, with an acknowledgement of structure and agency in most of the chapters. In general, the Handbook chapters appear to conceptualize age as a proxy variable for life stage, as a dimension of context, or as a threshold variable for entry into the special need/special services category. Age is not seen as a cause, nor is there a focus on individual adaptation and responses absent attention to the social influences that shape those behaviors. Hagestad and Dannefer call for precisely this level of thinking in their chapter. They also warn of microfication in the field—the "problem based microfocus" that results in too much emphasis on individual response to the problems of aging. While the Handbook has its share of chapters on health and chronic care, these issues are considered from macro and micro perspectives.
Does the implicit Handbook paradigm—focusing on life course and social institutions—match the current empirical literature? Hagestad and Dannefer suggest not. From a look at two major journals, they provide compelling evidence for an imbalanced emphasis in the literature on individual variables, and a dominant interest in illness and disability. Based on the authors' summary, it seems that in the literature, generally, age matters primarily as a marker or proxy for increased risk of health problems, and that our attempt to understand these phenomena are focused at the level of individual characteristics and behaviors. The lack of congruence between the broader perspective found in the Handbook and current research probably reflects the pragmatics of publishing research on manageable questions and in fundable areas; it also probably reflects the inertia of a dominant paradigm. These realities should not deter us from considering the larger questions, lest we fall prey to what Millie Seltzer used to call "itty-bitty" gerontology. She observed that the tendency as a field develops its methods, its science, is to focus on accumulation of knowledge driven by a particular paradigm, striving for methodological rigor and elegance, sometimes at the cost of reflection on the big picture. This overarching emphasis on the accumulation of ever more refined analyses without reflection on the underlying paradigm hinders the accumulation of knowledge and the critical consideration of the forces that shape it.
Do we have a shared vision of our paradigm(s)? In 1976, Maddox and Wiley declared that, "The ... study of aging needs but currently lacks widely shared paradigms which would provide common conceptualization of issues, standard measurements, and clearly defined agendas for the systematic testing of hypotheses derived from theory" ( p. 4). Qualitative researchers among us would, no doubt, argue for a more inclusive characterization of the research process to include inductive as well as deductive approaches and to see standard measurements as only one goal. Nonetheless, the question of shared paradigms remains. What age means, why it matters, and how it matters are at the heart of our theory and research. Conversation about these questions is essential for reflective, critical, meaningful accumulation of knowledge, perspective, and technique. Discussion of the implied and stated views of our field can help us stay focused on where we are heading and why, and on what our intellectual legacy will be for the next generation.
References
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