Taught my first course in Social Gerontology in 1978. Would anyone sign up, I wondered? Why would 18-year-old students be interested in aging? I marched into the classroom and laid out my notes that August day, perspiring from nervousness as much as from the heat. I couldn't help but notice the tall, broad-shouldered guy sitting in the front row. His name, I learned when I called the roll, was Kirby Criswell, an Iowa farm boy transplanted to Kansas to play football. Oh, great luck, I thought, echoing the prejudice college professors sometimes hold against football players. To my surprise, Kirby earned a gentlemanly C+ as well as my abiding affection and respect. I hope his life is going well. He not only laid to rest my stereotype of football players but also taught me why my Social Gerontology classes have filled every semester that I have taught them.
Kirby wrote his required paper on grandparenting, a topic that interested him because of his close relationship to his own grandmother. Much as he loved her, he also witnessed the tensions that arose when she moved in with his parents, into his brother’s old bedroom. Aging interested Kirby, as it does most students, because it was so close to his own life. Of course, most college students are not yet worried about growing old themselves. But all young people are members of families, and the dilemmas their parents and grandparents face affect them too. So it’s natural that they are drawn to the subject. Then, too, an increasing number of students these days are returning to school after having worked full-time for many years and raised families. These older students have an immediate interest in the topic of aging. The challenge for the instructor is to demonstrate how these personal concerns are linked to larger structural issues, such as how, for example, familial care of the frail elderly is influenced by population aging and by political decisions about the just distribution of societal resources. It was my interest in demonstrating to students how the subject matter of their lives is shaped by larger societal forces that led me to write this text. Organization
This text is divided into five parts and 17 chapters. The chapters in Part One, "Defining the Field," provide the student with a firm grounding in core methodological and theoretical issues and document key trends in population aging. Part Two, "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging," reflects the fact that social gerontology is an inherently interdisciplinary field. It provides a detailed look at the contributions of history, biology, and psychology to the study of aging. Part Three, "Social Aspects of Aging," examines changes in social roles, relationships, living arrangements, and health that occur as people age. Although everyone experiences the biological and psychological changes that are inherent in the aging process, the nature of that experience varies widely from person to person. The chapters in Part Four, “Managing Transitions,” introduce the social programs that provide income support and health care for the aging and examine key later-life transitions in work, health, and death and dying. Part Five, “Aging and Society,” examines aspects of aging at the societal level. The three chapters in this section discuss the economic and political aspects of aging. Distinctive Chapters
This book includes all the topics typically covered in a social gerontology text and contains three distinctive chapters. One of these is a separate chapter on the life course (Chapter 3, "Life Course Transitions"). I include this topic because of the growing emphasis in the field of social gerontology on the relationship between the quality of life in old age and an individual's cumulative experiences, choices, constraints, and opportunities over the life course. Another distinctive chapter focuses on the long-term care of the frail elderly (Chapter 10, "Caring for the Frail Elderly"). A substantial body of research on this subject examines the burdens and satisfactions family members experience in caring for their aging kin, the problems associated with nursing home care, and the advantages and disadvantages of various alternative living arrangements. This chapter provides a complete portrait of the range of long-term-care options and of the policy choices facing an aging society. It also includes the fascinating qualitative research on daily life in nursing homes that students find so interesting. Each semester that I have taught this course, I have found that students were confused by the vast array of social programs for income support, health care, social services, and long-term care in the United States. Most texts scatter explanations of these programs within various chapters. This book includes a separate chapter on the welfare state that explains the differences in how these programs are funded, who is eligible for benefits, what benefits are provided, and the relationship of the programs to each other (Chapter 11, "Old Age and the Welfare State"). It is intended to serve as a ready reference for students as they read about these programs at appropriate points elsewhere in the text. |
2008 McGraw-Hill Higher Education